Digital Storytelling and Legitimacy Building for New Ventures

Yuki Sato

Digital Storytelling and Legitimacy Building for New Ventures

Author(s)	Dr. Yuki Sato
Country	United States
Abstract	New ventures frequently seek stakeholder support before they possess extensive operating histories, established reputations, stable customer bases, or independently verifiable performance records. Under these conditions, legitimacy becomes a critical entrepreneurial resource because potential customers, employees, investors, partners, and other audiences must decide whether a young organization is sufficiently understandable, appropriate, credible, and worthy of engagement. Digital communication expands the opportunities through which ventures can construct such judgments, allowing founders to communicate venture origins, customer problems, technological capabilities, values, milestones, user evidence, and future ambitions through websites, social platforms, videos, crowdfunding environments, newsletters, and other digitally mediated narratives. This study develops a Digital Storytelling Legitimacy Framework for New Ventures (DSLF-NV) consisting of six dimensions: venture-identity clarity, narrative coherence, evidence credibility, stakeholder relevance, legitimate distinctiveness, and dialogic engagement. Because no real venture-level communication, audience-response, investment, or social-media dataset was supplied, the paper adopts a transparent simulation-based explanatory design. Five synthetic storytelling-maturity conditions from 20% to 100% were examined. The simulated New Venture Legitimacy Index rises from 39 to 89 across these scenarios, stakeholder comprehension from 43% to 92%, credibility from 38% to 90%, and willingness to engage from 35% to 84%, while perceived narrative inconsistency falls from 34% to 7%. The analysis also demonstrates that storytelling can generate a legitimacy paradox: narratives that create expectations unsupported by observable venture progress may initially attract attention but subsequently weaken credibility. Effective digital storytelling should therefore connect aspiration with verifiable evidence and preserve consistency across platforms and stakeholder encounters. The study contributes to entrepreneurial-legitimacy research by positioning digital storytelling as an iterative legitimacy-building architecture rather than a promotional communication technique. All analytical values are simulated and should not be interpreted as empirical estimates of actual ventures.
Keywords	digital storytelling, new venture legitimacy, entrepreneurial narratives, startup communication, venture identity, symbolic management, digital entrepreneurship, stakeholder engagement
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 5, Issue 3, May-June 2024
Published On	2024-05-16

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Digital Storytelling and Legitimacy Building for New Ventures

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