This paper investigates the relationships among business model innovation, employee absorptive capacity and innovation legitimacy with the method of hierarchical linear model(HLM) in cross-hierarchy analysis, based on the date of 402 valid samples from 48 manufacturing enterprises. The result shows: (1) The identification and sharing dimension, personal investment dimension of employee absorptive capacity have significant positive effects on business model creativity and application. Understanding and integration dimension has significant positive effect on business model application. (2) Practical legitimacy has significant negative effect on business model creativity, while cognitive legitimacy has significant positive effect on the business model application. (3) Practical legitimacy, cognitive legitimacy respectively plays the role of moderator between the personal investment and business model creativity significantly.