Making a Contribution to Entrepreneurship Research by Studying Crowd-Funded Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Abstract

This editorial outlines our perspective on the state of literature as well as suggestions for new contributions to entrepreneurship research in the area of crowd-funded opportunities. Our aim is, first, to outline what we see as best practices for research on crowd-funded entrepreneurial opportunities. Second, we aim to solicit additional articles for the Virtual Special Issue (VSI) on “Crowd-Funded Entrepreneurial Opportunities” in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. In contrast to typical editorial articles associated with special issues, we take a prospective approach and outline what we hope (and expect) to see in the literature in the future. Put differently, we are not going to summarize a subset of articles that have been accepted for publication—rather, we are going to delineate the subset of articles to be written that we would, ideally, like to see submitted to top-tier entrepreneurship journals in order to advance the literature. Along the way, we will describe best practices that we anticipate can elevate research in this burgeoning area of inquiry.

How Rewarding Are Your Rewards? A Value-Based View of Crowdfunding Rewards and Crowdfunding Performance

“…Meanwhile, by highlighting the different ways in which the three reward values jointly incentivize crowdfunders, our theory and findings also offer novel theoretical insights to advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of crowdfunders’ backing decisions. In sum, we advance our understanding of “why crowdfunders back a project” by theorizing and specifying “what kind of rewards can satisfy the needs of crowdfunders,” thus echoing the calls set forth in recent reviews (e.g., McKenny et al, 2017; Pollack, Maula et al, 2019) and offering valuable theoretical insights about the determination mechanisms of crowdfunding performance.…”

“…We extend the boundary of consumption value theory by applying this perspective in the context of reward-based crowdfunding and developing a value-based view to highlight the cause-and-effect link between crowdfunding rewards and performance. This nuanced view not only enriches the theoretical pool of the extant crowdfunding research (c.f., Pollack, Maula et al, 2019), but it also provides novel insights into consumption value theory.…”

“…Echoing the call of integrating crowdfunding research and marketing literature in recent comprehensive reviews (e.g., Pollack et al, 2019), we address the above theoretical gap by integrating the insights of consumption value theory (Holbrook, 1999; Newman & Gross, 1991; Sheth et al, 1991a) and the crowdfunding literature to develop a value-based view to theorize the effects of crowdfunding rewards on the performance of crowdfunding projects. As consumption value theory proposes, the purchase decisions of consumers largely manifest as a function of the consumption values carried by a product (Dai & Zhang, 2019; Sheth et al, 1991a), with a consumption value defined as the extent to which the product can satisfy certain consumer needs (Holbrook, 1999).…”

Searching for Success—Entrepreneurs’ Responses to Crowdfunding Failure

“…Second, we contribute to research on crowdfunding—a “hot topic” in the entrepreneurship literature (Pollack et al, 2019). This growing body of work has paid surprisingly little attention to the consequences of crowdfunding failure.…”

“…Adding to the growing number of studies on internal and external contingencies of problemistic search such as slack resources, organizational structures, and environmental dynamism (see Kotiloglu et al, 2019 for an overview), we show that a temporal perspective offers a novel explanation of why entrepreneurs’ responses to failure may vary. Finally, this study contributes to entrepreneurship research by addressing the call for additional studies on crowd-funded entrepreneurial opportunities (Pollack et al, 2019). In particular, we provide new insights into the search processes of entrepreneurs who repeatedly turn to crowdfunding in an attempt to successfully raise funds (Butticè et al, 2017; Skirnevskiy et al, 2017).…”