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This paper explores innovation versus risk for small companies using crowdfunding products as a proxy for analysis. A database with 127 consumer electronics, namely 3D printers and smart watches, are collected from Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The metric of Real-Win-Worth is adapted to provide a well-rounded assessment of the product’s innovation, risk and other related business and engineering aspects. Our result suggests a preliminary framework of innovation and risk balance for crowdfunding NPD success. A statistical model is developed to correlate the amount of crowdfunding raised with 64% predictability. These results may contribute to better understand and balance risk and innovation in crowdfunding and small company contexts.

In The Kickstarter Handbook, business writer Don Steinberg interviews dozens of people who have raised at least $100,000 on Kickstarter. You'll learn all the strategies of an effective Kickstarter campaign. You'll learn the perils and pitfalls that have dashed many a dream. And you'll learn what to do in the event of a best-case scenario - when your product goes viral and suddenly the cash starts flowing in.

In this paper, the authors intend to answer the question “what set of features determine a project’s success?”. They begin by studying the dynamics of Kickstarter, a popular reward-based crowdfunding platform, and the impact of social networks on this platform. Contrary to previous studies, their analysis is not restricted to project-based features alone; instead, they expand the features into four different categories: temporal traits, personal traits, geo-location traits, and network traits. Using a comprehensive dataset of 18K projects and 116K tweets, they provide several unique insights about these features and their effects on the success of Kickstarter projects. Based on these insights, they build a supervised learning framework to learn a model that can recommend a set of investors to Kickstarter projects.

Using a survey of crowdfunding project founders in the culture industries, the authors explored the relationship between certain social and psychological characteristics and attitudes toward crowdfunding. They examined how extraversion, surface acting, emotional labor, the social composition of project backers, and project success all relate to enjoyment and future intentions of using crowdfunding in the culture industries. Crowdfunding appears to advantage culture producers with particular personality structures while disadvantaging others. In sum, crowdfunding seems beneficial but might be useful only for particular types of artists and therefore should not supplant other traditional financing modes.

To better understand the factors affecting campaign outcomes, this paper targets the content and usage patterns of project updates–communications intended to keep potential funders aware of a campaign’s progress. The authors analyzed the content and usage patterns of a large corpus of project updates on Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms. Using semantic analysis techniques, they derived a taxonomy of the types of project updates created during campaigns, and found discrepancies between the design intent of a project update and the various uses in practice (e.g. social promotion). The analysis also showed that specific uses of updates had stronger associations with campaign success than the project’s description. Design implications were formulated from the results to help designers better support various uses of updates in crowdfunding campaigns.

Does a better cultural milieu make a city more livable for residents and improve its business environment for firms? I compute a measure of cultural specialization for 346 U.S. metropolitan areas and ask if differences in cultural environment across cities capitalize into housing price and wage differentials. Simple correlations replicate standard results from the literature: cities that are more specialized in cultural occupations enjoy higher factor prices. Estimations using time-series data, controlling for city characteristics and correcting for endogeneity weaken the magnitude of this effect. Even though the arts and culture might be appealing to some people and firms, such determinants are not strong enough to affect factor prices at the city level.

This article analyzes the impact of crowdfunding on journalism. It is based on a case study about Spot.Us, a platform pioneering community-funded reporting. The study concludes that a crowdfunded journalistic process requires journalists to renegotiate their role and professional identity to succeed in the changing realm of creative work. It also concludes that reader donations build a strong connection from the reporters to the donors, which creates a new sense of responsibility to the journalists. The journalists perceive donors as investors, that cannot be let down. From the donor's perspective, donating does not create a strong relationship from donor to the journalist, or to the story to which they contributed. The primary motivation for donating is to contribute to the common good and social change. Consequently, donors’ motives are essentially more altruistic than instrumental.

Language conveying positive psychological capital reflects optimism, hope, resilience, and confidence. Use of this language in organizational narratives has been linked to key organizational outcomes such as firm performance. Drawing from positive organizational behavior and signaling theory literatures, the authors examine how language indicating positive psychological capital in crowdfunding profiles impacts crowdfunding campaign performance. Using a sample of 895 Kickstarter campaigns, they find that higher levels of positive psychological capital rhetoric lead to increased rate of funding and an increased probability of meeting funding goals. These relationships are moderated by the amount of funding requested by the venture.

It is hard to underestimate the extent to which technology could improve philanthropy. Managing donations electronically and transparently is just the start. By increasing access and lowering barriers to entry and innovation, technology is enabling the democratization of philanthropy.

To understand the ways in which technology can change philanthropy and the barriers to that happening, the author has created a framework that looks at technology’s impact in four broad areas, what she calls “gateways”: greater access to information, greater access to net-works, lower barriers to entry, and lower barriers to innovation. Crowdsourcing is playing a main role in this process.

The rise of crowdfunding as a more distributed way to form capital is aligned with the changes in the flow and distribution of information (via the Internet) and the creation and distribution of manufacturing capabilities (maker spaces and fabrication centers). Existing securities regulations were not crafted for the social web. Governments and policy experts worldwide are considering the possible impact of crowdfunding and crowdfund investing and trying to fashion new regulations, empower new technologies, and equip entrepreneurs with sufficient information to decide if crowdfunding is a viable funding or investment vehicle for these enterprises. The rate of growth of crowdfunding, and its emergence in developing and developed countries, suggests that this phenomenon can become a tool in the innovation ecosystems of most countries.