Exploring the Crowdfunding Opportunities for HE Innovative Projects

Abstract

In the current context, crowdfunding platforms are gaining more and more importance, allowing the coexistence of financing resources and investment opportunities for innovative projects all over the world. This is an echo of the "wisdom of the crowd" theory that brings value not only in decision making but also in problem solving, generating the development of new products that are thus tested to be viable on the market. Romania is at the beginning of the journey in this promising but also challenging world. The promising part results from statistics and facts on the successful campaigns in the last few years, especially in the tech domain, and the challenging part from the study of the most common reasons for the failure of a crowdfunding project. This article presents an analysis of the crowdfunding platforms to find how useful they can be for innovative university projects. Some projects carried out by students of the University of Petrosani were presented. In decision making of the most useful platform for each of the university projects, a multiple-criteria decision analysis was used. The identification of the best suited platforms for the projects within the University of Petrosani represents the main results of the present research.