he runs research groups on virtual communities, e-health, and ubiquitous/mobile computing and manages several publicly funded research projects. his teaching and research areas include It innovation management, service science, ubiquitous and mobile computing, collaboration engineering, e-health, online communities, and It management. MichaeL huber is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München since he graduated from there with an M.S. in computer Science in 2007. his research interests include community engineering, virtual communities, communities for innovations, It support of collaborative activities, and humancomputer interaction. he is engaged in the research project GENIE, a project that supports customer-driven development of innovations for software companies, funded by the German Federal Ministry of research and Education. he also runs the research project SaPiens-an Internet-based ideas competition for students and scholars, collaboratively developing innovations. uLrich bretschneider is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München, Munich, Germany. he graduated in business administration (majoring in Information Systems) at the university of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany. his current research experiences and interests include virtual communities as well as open innovation, especially ideas competitions and ideas communities. he runs the research project GENIE, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and research. he is also engaged in the research project SaPiens.
Incentive-based forms of crowdfunding-such as reward-, equity-and lending-based crowdfunding-are becoming increasingly popular. However, research that studies backers' motivations for funding in these environments is still in an embryonic state, revealing an inconsistent and narrow picture. The few existing studies are largely guided by the idea that backers are mainly egoistically motivated and do not have prosocial motives. We developed a research model that describes backers' motivation and conducted an empirical study to examine this model. Results indicate that backers indeed have several self-interest motivations for funding: prospect of a reward; expectation of recognition from others; to lobby a certain project in the hopes of its fruition; and to develop their image. However, some backers are also prosocially motivated in that they develop feelings of liking for a certain venture and/or project team. Furthermore, we found evidence that herding has a significant moderating effect on backers' reward motivation. Strategic IS researchers as well as crowdfunding practitioners can draw on our findings to systematically design, implement, and evaluate potential incentive systems that respond to reward-, recognition-, lobbying-, image-and liking-motives and thereby attract the crowd more effectively to invest in ventures presented on incentive-based crowdfunding systems.
Start-ups often face the challenge of a shortage of capital, the so-called funding gap, which can be overcome by raising small amounts of money from a large number of individuals. As crowdfunding suffers from a continuous rise in failure rates, the aim of this article is to contribute to the research concerning success factors in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns by focusing on signaling theory. Based on data retrieved from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, our results indicate that social ties, investment preparation and presentation, the supply of multiple rewards as well as endeavors to communicate and interact with the crowd positively influence the probability of success of a reward-based crowdfunding campaign. In contrast, the funding goal, a campaign's runtime and the estimated time of delivery for the rewards have a negative impact on the successful completion of a campaign.
Crowdsourcing has gained much attention in practice over the last years. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept for performing different tasks and value creation activities. Nevertheless, despite its popularity, there is still comparatively little well-founded knowledge on crowdsourcing, particularly with regard to crowdsourcing intermediaries. Crowdsourcing intermediaries play a key role in crowdsourcing initiatives as they assure the connection between the crowdsourcing companies and the crowd. However, the issue of how crowdsourcing intermediaries manage crowdsourcing initiatives and the associated challenges has not been addresses by research yet. We address these issues by conducting a case study with a German start-up crowdsourcing intermediary called testCloud that offers software testing services for companies intending to partly or fully outsource their testing activities to a certain crowd. The case study shows that testCloud faces three main challenges, these are: managing the process, managing the crowd and managing the technology. For each dimension, we outline mechanisms that testCloud applies for facing the challenges associated with crowdsourcing projects.
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