Crowdfunding through the Internet, a new fundraising technique for small business ventures, can benefit fund‐seeking companies by helping to overcome funding difficulties, providing value‐added involvement, facilitating access to further funding, providing publicity and contacts, and enabling fundraising with only limited or no loss of control and ownership.
The majority of published work refers to the pre‐investment phase of the crowdfunding process, with only very little academic knowledge currently relating to the post‐investment phase.
This article tries to identify the particular characteristics of academics who form spin-off companies, with a view to making recommendations to improve the environment for such entrepreneurial activities. The original research on which the article is based was carried out in the UK, but constant reference is made to other studies (from the USA and Canada in particular) in order to make the article's conclusions generally applicable.
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