Crowdfunding as a new collaborative process in the knowledge economy

Abstract

Purpose The transition from industrial to social economy and from knowledge produces a paradigm shift, which is the space in which new professions, new values and even new forms of financing are shaped. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of crowdfunding, and the specific focus is the small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs’) dimension, typical in startups firms. This work discusses the main thematic areas in the scientific literature on the phenomenon of crowdfunding (RQ1) and how is crowdfunding treated in SMEs’ dimension (RQ2). Design/methodology/approach To analyze the literature, this study uses structure literature review methodology. To answer RQ1, the articles in the SCOPUS database on the theme of crowdfunding were surveyed. To RQ2, the analysis focused on the combined theme between the crowdfunding phenomenon and the SMEs’ dimension. Findings The study shows that from the scientific point of view, the treatment of the crowdfunding phenomenon is strongly developing in many research areas. The most recurrent are those that deal with studies linked to socio-geographical and institutional contexts and those that analyze individual behavior of investors and crowd funders. Residual area remains the one dedicated to SMEs, where this research has led to poor results. Originality/value This paper implements the studies on crowdfunding, a phenomenon that is rapidly expanding worldwide. Particular attention is paid to startup firms, and the business dimension was studied for SMEs, for which it was initially conceived and investigated. Future work will try to apply the results of this research into a case study about an Italian startup firm.

Soft and hard information in equity crowdfunding: network effects in the digitalization of entrepreneurial finance

“…Our work builds on the emerging literature on crowdfunding (see Bruton et al, 2015;McKenny et al, 2017;Paoloni et al, 2019;Mochkabadi & Volkmann, 2020 for overviews and reviews). Most academic research on crowdfunding focuses on non-dilutive rewards-based platforms such as Kickstarter (e.g., Chan & Parhankangas, 2017) or peer-to-peer lending platforms such as Prosper (e.g., Hidebrand et al, 2017;Kgoroeadira et al, 2019).…”

Crowdfunding small businesses and startups: a systematic review, an appraisal of theoretical insights and future research directions

“…The researchers organized the relevant content from the extracted articles, scrutinized it, and identified the themes on this topic. Their bibliographic analysis revealed that crowdfunding (Eiteneyer et al, 2019;Kaminski et al, 2020;Kgoroeadira et al, 2019;Paschen, 2017;Di Pietro et al, 2018) crowd sourcing (Chaudhari and Sinha, 2021;Eiteneyer et al, 2019;Foster, 2019;Paoloni et al, 2019;Paschen, 2017), equity crowdfunding (Bonini and Capizzi, 2019;Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2017;Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2018;Tiberius and Hauptmeijer, 2021), as well as crowd investing /crowdinvesting (Ezangina and Evstratov, 2019;Goethner et al, 2021;Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2017;Hornuf and Schwienbacher, 2018) were the most used keywords by the authors that were featured in this analysis.…”

Equity crowdfunding platforms and social media: a Twitter analysis

“…Since the first platform emerged, crowdfunding has become a new way to raise money for new ventures, and from a scientific point of view, the treatment of the crowdfunding phenomenon is developing in many areas of research, e.g. business, management, accounting, economics, econometrics and finance (Paoloni et al , 2019). However, despite this growing popularity, academic understanding of the phenomenon is quite limited (Colombo et al , 2015), and the concept of crowdfunding is in a state of evolution that makes definitions still arbitrarily limited (e.g.…”

“…This usually happens without the contribution of common financial intermediaries (Rodriguez-Ricardo et al , 2018) but through the use of the Internet (Mollick, 2014). In particular, crowdfunding is a collaborative process of a group of people who use their money in common to support the efforts of organisations and people (Paoloni et al , 2019). Taking inspiration from the principles of crowdsourcing (Kleemann et al , 2008) and microfinance (Morduch, 1999), crowdfunding can be defined as a community-based funding method (Agrawal et al , 2015).…”