Contextual pathways to digital legitimacy

Digital legitimacy has become a critical determinant of entrepreneurial success in emerging economies, where institutional voids and information asymmetries sharply elevate entrepreneurs’ dependence on digital signals to gain stakeholder credibility. Existing entrepreneurial cognition theories, largely developed in advanced economies, insufficiently account for the structural heterogeneity of emerging markets. This study examines how creativity, alertness, and resilience shape digital literacy in Indonesia and Malaysia – two nations that, despite persistent differences, share cultural similarities but distinct economic structures. Using survey data from 346 Indonesian and Malaysian entrepreneurs and employing multi group analysis, we find that creativity strengthens alertness, resilience, and digital legitimacy in both contexts. However, Indonesian entrepreneurs rely more on resilience to build legitimacy in a volatile, domestically driven economy, whereas Malaysian entrepreneurs depend more on alertness within an export-oriented, policy-led environment. The findings extend entrepreneurial cognition research to emerging markets and offer context-specific implications for entrepreneurship education and digital policy design.