How is innovation realized? To address this question, I have carried out a five-year joint research project with my former colleagues at the Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University. Innovation requires resources to transform new ideas into commercial goods, which can then be marketed and diffused throughout society. Yet the process of innovation always contains an element of uncertainty, and there is no ex-ante objective consensus that a new idea will ultimately succeed. How, then, can innovators mobilize the necessary resources? My research examined the process of innovation in Japanese firms, drawing on twenty-three case studies of Okochi Memorial Prize winners. The study empirically and theoretically identified three possible routes that innovators could explore to create legitimacy for resource mobilization without objective prospects.