Over the past twenty years, there has been a rise of interest in the concept of ecosystems, first as a new way to depict the competitive environment but also as strategy to offer new perspectives on business and innovation. This however raises new questions on legitimacy. As proximity appears to be a way of understanding the interplay between an organization and its environment, we draw on previous works on these two notions to work on a longitudinal case study and show that proximity and legitimacy are closely intertwined. We contribute to the literature on both legitimacy and proximity, by positioning proximities as antecedent to legitimacy, but also as an interface with different audiences. We consider legitimacy in its three, complementary, perspectives – legitimacy-as-property, legitimacy-as-process and legitimacy-as-perception. By building on proximity through discursive and performative processes, actors are able to build the identity and value proposition of the ecosystem.
