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Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular channel for project fundraising for entrepreneurial ventures. Such efforts require fundraisers to develop and manage a crowdfunding campaign over a period of time and several stages. Thus, the authors aim to identify the stages fundraisers go through in their crowdfunding campaign process and how their engagement evolves throughout this process.

Following a multiple case study research design analysing six successful campaigns, the current study suggests a taxonomy of stages the fundraisers go through in their crowdfunding campaign management process while identifying the types of engagement displayed and their relative intensity at each of these stages.

The study proposes a five-stage process framework (pre-launch, launch, mid-campaign, conclusion and post-campaign), accompanied by a series of propositions outlining the relative intensity of different types of engagement throughout this process. The authors show that engagement levels appear with high intensity at pre-launch, and to a lesser degree also at the post-launch stage while showing low intensity at the stages in between them. More specifically, cognitive and behavioural engagement are most prominent at the pre- and post-launch stages. Emotional engagement is highest during the launch, mid-launch and conclusion stages. And social engagement maintains moderate levels of intensity throughout the process.

This study focuses on the campaign process using engagement theory, thus identifying the differing engagement patterns throughout the dynamic crowdfunding campaign management process, not just in one part.

The purpose of this study is to analyse potential models of Islamic crowdfunding as an alternative financing option for micro-entrepreneurs in Malaysia. While crowdfunding has gained traction as an alternative funding source for businesses, it is unclear how far this concept can benefit a group of micro-entrepreneurs in Malaysia.

This study uses a qualitative research approach by using data collected through semi-structured interviews with several experts and practitioners in crowdfunding, Shariah and entrepreneurship. Prior to discussing the facets of the findings, the data were analysed based on a thematic approach.

The findings reveal that while previous works of related literature suggest crowdfunding as a viable alternative financing option for entrepreneurs and their businesses, in reality, its practical implementation presents challenges. Numerous micro-entrepreneurs need more training in the areas of management and marketing. Such concerns raise questions about their ability to attract potential project backers. With the proper selection of Shariah contracts and several approaches to risk management, Islamic crowdfunding can potentially become an alternative funding source for microbusinesses.

Given the exploratory nature of this study regarding the applicability of Islamic crowdfunding as an alternative fund for micro-entrepreneurs, its findings may not fully encompass Malaysia’s context because of the limited number of participants involved.

The findings of this study offer guidelines on how to implement Islamic crowdfunding for micro-entrepreneurs. Consequently, Islamic crowdfunding has the potential to alleviate the government’s burden of providing funds for micro-enterprises and enhance their skills and mentality to be more independent, creative and able to promote their products.

While Islamic crowdfunding can be an alternative opportunity for business enterprises and community-based projects, it promotes the spirit of cooperation and collaboration within society.

Although Islamic crowdfunding is a topic that has been discussed previously, empirical investigations in this area remain scarce, mainly through qualitative approaches. Distinguishing from prior literature, this study analyses several potential models of Islamic crowdfunding from the perspectives of experts, practitioners and related agencies for micro-entrepreneurs. Moreover, this study bridges insights from related literature so that they offer practical applications to support micro-entrepreneurs in Malaysia.

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the adoption of waqf technology (Waqftech) using blockchain smart contracts for corporate waqf crowdfunding. Despite the growing interest in Waqftech, Malaysian enterprises have not fully embraced this emerging technology because of uncertainty regarding the benefits it offers to contributors. The research incorporates two theoretical frameworks: the electronic data interchange (EDI) model for firms’ technology adoption, and the triple bottom line theory (TBL) for corporate social responsibility.

A quantitative method using a cross-sectional survey design with a five-point Likert scale questionnaire was used. Data was collected from 210 decision-makers representing small and medium-sized enterprises and analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

The findings from this research suggest that Malaysian enterprises are influenced by both corporate and social predictive benefits when using blockchain crowdfunding, but not by environmental benefits. The adoption of blockchain smart contracts does not correlate with predictive environmental benefits because of misconceptions about the disruptive technology’s impact on biological and digital environmental preservation.

This research focuses on organizational behavior rather than individual users of waqf crowdfunding, and it is limited, primarily focusing within Malaysia and regions with similar waqf structures.

The Waqftech framework allows innovative mechanisms for executing corporate waqf investment returns to the intended beneficiaries through the smart contracts’ platform. In addition, this study supports relevant corporate social responsibility and creating shared value technology adoption theories, including EDI and TBL. Aside from this, the study provides empirical implications for waqf management using fintech platforms.

This groundbreaking study focuses on creating a Waqftech model for corporate waqf crowdfunding. The results of this study are important for the development of government policies that support the use of Waqftech in charitable fundraising. More research on biological and digital environmental perspectives is proposed to foster investors’ confidence in the visibility of digital tracking and lead to swift investments in future metaverse fundraising platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an accessible and interdisciplinary research strategy in organisational ethnography, called action ethnography, that acknowledges key concepts from action research and engaged and immersive ethnography. It aims to encourage methodological innovation and an impact turn in ethnographic practice.

A working definition of “action ethnography” is provided first. Then, to illustrate how an action ethnography can be designed by considering impact from the outset, the author draws on a study she is undertaking with a grassroots human rights monitoring group, based in England, and then discusses advantages and limitations to the approach.

The author suggests three main tenets to action ethnography that embrace synergies between action research and ethnography: researcher immersion, intervention leading to change and knowledge contributions that are useful to both practitioners and researchers.

This paper provides researchers who align with aspects of both action research and ethnography with an accessible research strategy to employ, and a better understanding of the interplay between the two approaches when justifying their research designs. It also offers an example of designing an action ethnography in practice.

Whereas “traditional” ethnography has emphasised a contribution to theoretical knowledge, less attention has been on a contribution to practice and to those who ethnographers engage with in the field. Action ethnography challenges researchers to consider the impact of their research from the outset during the research design, rather upon reflection after a study is completed.

The modern corporation is evaluated by many measures that go beyond profit, which was the emphasis for years previously. Today’s corporation is weighed against expectations of many stakeholders, including not just customers but employees, investors, the government and even the public at large with no discernible financial or other tie to a company. As such, corporate boards necessarily must be concerned with more than financial performance, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the increasing emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. Given that public relations scholars and practitioners have long been concerned with stakeholder relationships, social responsibility and other non-financial indicators, it would make sense that public relations has a more obvious presence on corporate boards.

This study examined the 25 companies in the Fortune Modern Board 25 to determine how many board members had a background or expertise in public relations that would contribute to the leadership necessary for the concerns of the modern corporation, and whether the boards had a committee designated to public relations or related functions.

Results show that there are few corporate boards that have public relations represented prominently in either their members or committees. The same is true for executive leadership teams. Public relations or communications executives do appear to play some role in ESG, CSR and DEI reporting, but often there are staff members with those specific titles and roles.

The study was limited to 25 corporations on a Forbes list that ranked them as best in communicating ESG, CSR and DEI. The method examined publicly available literature which was revealing to the research questions, but more could be learned by interview or survey with CCOs.

The study shows the current presence of public relations capacity in terms of members of corporate boards, corporate committees and among the C-suite is not significant. Also, rather than PR as a function owning modern concerns of DEI, ESG and CSR, there are professionals with specific expertise in those areas who are responsible for those corporate issues.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), ESG (environmental, social, governance) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) have recently been stressed as important for corporations to measure and report. The role of the public relations profession in managing and/or communicating in these areas is important to consider in terms of public expectations and satisfaction of communication on these subjects.

This paper is unique in integrating public relations theory and practice with board theory and the current management concerns with ESG, CSR and DEI. Little if any previous research has considered which professions are in charge of communicating on these concerns.

This study aims to determine the effect of bank ownership on the credit risk of Indonesian Islamic local banks (ILBs).

This study uses the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique with a sample of 155 Islamic local banks in Indonesia from 2012 to 2019.

The results show that commissioner board (D.COW) ownership has a negative effect on credit risk. This indicates that an increase in the number of shares of Islamic local banks owned by the commissioner board reduces credit risk. On the other hand, government ownership (D.GOW), the Sharia supervisory board (D.SOW) and the director board (D.DOW) do not affect credit risk.

The government, Sharia supervisory board and director board need opportunities to easily own more Islamic local bank shares. Therefore, the provisions regarding the share ownership rights of the government, Sharia supervisory board and director board need to be improved to increase their role in reducing credit risk.

Previous researchers have not studied the effect of government ownership, the commissioner board, the Sharia supervisory board and the ownership of directors on credit risk at the ILB in Indonesia.

This chapter provides an overview of entrepreneurship clubs. It charts the development of these organisations, as a form of extracurricular activity. It introduces different forms of entrepreneurship clubs, such as Junior Achievement (JA) and Enactus, and explains how they grew from 1919 to the present. It also illustrates the differences between self-organised clubs, organised programs using clubs as a learning method, structured societies and nationally organised cooperative societies. The second part introduces research on student clubs in entrepreneurship education. It explores the benefits of clubs. It shows that clubs assist student learning, enable the acquisition of practical skills and improve college attendance, employment opportunities and career attainment. We argue that entrepreneurship clubs have improved student learning outcomes in entrepreneurship and simulated entrepreneurial learning, while impacting student self-efficacy and intentionality as well as improving employability and social learning. The final part of the chapter provides advice and tips for educators advising student-run entrepreneurship clubs. Ultimately, the chapter explains how student clubs have developed, why they are important for student learning and how advisors can support them.

The phenomenal proliferation of crowdfunding platforms raises concerns on the heightened occurrence of financial crimes since billions of funds are exchanged through these online systems frequently. Accordingly, some countries have implemented legislative responses to address these risks, although each countries’ laws have varying degrees of severity. Hence, the purpose of this study is to assess the efficiency and robustness of Mauritian laws to combat financial crimes that may arise from a crowdfunding transaction with a particular emphasis on money laundering and tax evasion.

To achieve this research objective, the black letter approach was used to analyse Mauritian rules and regulations on the researched topic and a comparative analysis was carried out against the corresponding laws on crowdfunding in some other jurisdictions, notably the UK and the USA with the view of suggesting the policy recommendations to Mauritian authorities.

It was found that there is still scope for improving the existing legal and regulatory framework on crowdfunding in Mauritius to prevent instances of money laundering and tax evasion. The paper suggests that a crowdfunding operator must be categorised as a reporting person and must carry out regular due diligence checks. There must also be more collaboration in terms of information exchanges and training sessions among the tax authority of Mauritius, crowdfunding operators, fund seekers and investors to shed light on the tax treatment of income and deductions to avoid issues of tax evasion.

At present, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is amongst the first academic writings on the efficiency of Mauritian laws in dealing with the risk of financial crimes through crowdfunding, and also, because existing literature is quite scarce on assessing the adequacy of crowdfunding rules in developing countries, this research aims at filling in the gap in literature. The study is carried out with the aim of combining a large amount of empirical, theoretical and factual information that can be of use to various stakeholders and not only to academics.

This article aims to investigate the status of and the trends in the intertwining of crowdfunding and innovation literature by identifying, evaluating and synthesizing the findings from previous research. This paper provides a bibliometric meta-analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on innovation and crowdfunding research.

Using a bibliometric approach, this research scrutinizes all articles that include terms related to “crowdfunding” and “innovation” (in their title, abstract or keywords) in Elsevier’s Scopus database. VosViewer and Bibliometrix package in R have been used to analyse 150 articles.

The results suggest that there are three main research clusters in the innovation and crowdfunding literature. The first cluster highlights the role of crowdfunding in fostering radical and incremental innovation. The second cluster focuses on the concept of openness and its effect on innovation in crowdfunding campaigns, while the third cluster explains the role of platforms’ innovation in crowdfunding success.

Taking a holistic perspective, this contribution advances new knowledge on the intertwining of crowdfunding and innovation research fields. It implies that crowdfunding is facilitating the flow of knowledge between different stakeholders, including project initiators and crowd investors, among others, as they all benefit from open innovation platforms.