Advances in crowdfunding : research and practice

Abstract

Crowdfunding is a method to obtain money from large audiences, where each individual provides a small amount, instead of raising large sums from a small group of sophisticated investors (Belleflamme et al. 2014). Such pooling of contributions from multiple backers (Short et al. 2017) is done via the Internet, and often without standard financial intermedi- aries (Mollick 2014). This phenomenon finds its origin in the application of crowdsourcing principles to the practices of fundraising while creating new community-enabled financing channels (Schwienbacher and Larralde 2012) for a wide variety of projects including commercial, cul- tural, humanitarian, social, political, environmental, and technological projects to name a few.