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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.

This study furthers one’s understanding of the motivations of the crowdfunding crowd by empirically examining critical factors that influence the crowd's decision to support a crowdfunding project.

Backer's comments from a sample of the top 100 most funded technology product projects on KickStarter were collected. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis strategy was adopted to investigate critical motivational factors. Three experts mapped those factors to the known theoretical constructs of social exchange theory (SET).

Although backers are motivated by value, they are also motivated by far less tangible social factors including trust and a feeling of psychological ownership. Findings suggest that the crowd is far more than a passive group of investors or customers and should be viewed as participatory stakeholders. This study serves as guidance for project owners hoping to motivate the crowd and for future investigators examining backer motivations in other types of crowdsourcing projects.

Online chatter in the form of user-generated comments is an excellent data source for researchers to mine for value and meaning.

Given strong feelings of psychological ownership, project owners should actively engage the crowd and solicit the crowd for advice and help in order to motivate them.

The study presents the first empirical exploration of backer motivations using LDA guided by theory and the knowledge of experts. A framework of latent motivational factors is proposed.

This paper analyses the factors that make fashion-product crowdfunding campaigns successful. The authors argue that crowdfunding is an innovative and functional way of bringing new fashion items to the market. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether product innovation, lifecycle and sustainability have a positive effect on the success of fashion crowdfunding campaigns. The findings highlight that the success of the fashion crowdfunding campaigns depends on creators' adherence to the values of the platform which they use to raise capital.

A total of 300 fashion crowdfunding projects running between the 17th of October and the 15th of December 2017 were collected from Kickstarter – the world's largest crowdfunding platform based on reward-based all-or-nothing model. Two-step binomial logistic regression was used to analyse the data.

The model predicted a significant increase in the odds of success for the fashion items crowdfunded during the first-time production, and innovative and environmentally sustainable products with a higher price range of rewards. In line with previous literature, regression analyses predicted a significant effect of the control variables of goal amount (negative) and the number of rewards (positive). Contrary to previous studies, neither the presence of a video nor the campaign length predicted success.

The novel findings of this study contribute to the literature by providing an analysis of success factors of fashion items on crowdfunding platforms. The results show that innovative, environmentally sustainable and higher-priced products produced by early-stage ventures are better welcomed by the audiences.

This conceptual paper focuses on a common observation in the implementation stage of reward-based crowdfunding (RBC) – entrepreneurs' failures and delays in delivery of rewards to investors, which, in turn, may be perceived as violations of reward delivery obligations.

Drawing on entrepreneurial personality theory and psychological contract theory, this paper develops propositions and identifies factors related to both entrepreneurs (overconfidence and narcissism) and factors related to investors (types of motivators and psychological contracts) that may explain the perceived violations of reward delivery obligations. Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.

The theoretical analysis, by wielding two independently developed literatures, has demonstrated that it is important to investigate factors that are related to both investors and entrepreneurs in understanding issues and challenges at different stages of the RBC model. The authors believe that the current analysis provides an integrated understanding and a solid foundation for researchers to further examine these issues by empirically testing these propositions.

The authors examined two previously understudied psychological factors in the context of RBC – entrepreneurial traits, mainly overconfidence and narcissism, and the type of psychological contracts formed between investors and entrepreneurs, both of which, according to McKenny et al. (2017), need greater attention from researchers studying crowdfunding.

The purpose of this study is to understand the role of the migrant entrepreneur’s social capital and specifically their family social capital in the success of their crowdfunding ventures.

This paper develops an exploratory single case study of the Persu Bag started by a Chinese migrant entrepreneur in the USA, which was documented through in-depth interviews, email communication, social media interactions and secondary documents publicly available. This paper draws on crowdfunding and social capital literature to fulfil the purpose and adopt the perspective of the migrant entrepreneur in the study.

The study shows that the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneur’s family network contributes with their operand and operant resources from both the country of residence and country of origin. Besides having financial capacity, institutional knowledge and experience from both the host and home countries, the family network in both countries make the crowdfunding immigrant entrepreneur’s families more resourceful, providing additional benefits to the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneurs in the development of the campaign and crowdfunded venture.

This study broadens the understanding of the ways migrant entrepreneurs can rely on their family social capital for building financial capacity and starting a crowdfunded venture.

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.

Even though the crowdfunding (CF) literature is rapidly reaching its maturity phase, the topic of serial CF (i.e. the participation in more than one CF campaign) is as much promising as still largely under explored. This study thus aims to offer a thorough view of the dynamic and complex processes characterizing the participation of the start-ups to more than one campaign adopting a business network perspective.

In line with an explorative research aim, a multiple case study analysis is performed by taking into consideration four start-ups engaged in more than one CF campaigns with different combinations of equity and non-equity CF, adopting the actor–resource–activity (ARA) model as theoretical framework.

Multiple CF campaigns are embedded in the overall changing startup’s network and are affected by the concurrent and overlapping startup’s development processes. From this standpoint, the adoption of the ARA model suggests to reconsider the “serial” dimension of multiple CF campaigns. These processes can be more or less “linear” as they could be affected by the combination of CF schemes and by the degree of alignment of actors, activities and resources, whose “assembly” can be facilitated by learning processes and impaired by unexpected circumstances.

This paper explores in depth the startup’s serial CF journey, building on recent studies calling for stronger analyses of the directions and outcomes of innovative funding trajectories pursued and implemented by new business ventures. From this standpoint, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to consider a complete spectrum of combinations between CF schemes within serial CF, thus allowing for a better understanding of the role of such a factor within a dynamic and contextual view, that is, that offered by the business network perspective. This paper also contributes to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research on start-ups.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

Crowdfunding (CF) has become an increasingly popular means of financing for entrepreneurs and has attracted significant attention from both researchers and practitioners in recent years. The purpose of this study is to investigate the core content and knowledge diffusion paths in the CF field. Specifically, we aim to identify the main topics and themes that have emerged in this field and to trace the evolution of CF knowledge over time.

This study employs co-word clustering and main path analysis (MPA) to examine the historical development of CF research based on 1,528 journal articles retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database.

The results of the analysis reveal that CF research focuses on seven themes: sustainability, entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurship, fintech, social entrepreneurship, social capital, and microcredits. The analysis of the four main paths reveals that equity CF has been the dominant topic in the past years. Recently, CF research has tended to focus on topics such as fintech, the COVID-19 pandemic, competition, Brexit, and policy response.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore knowledge diffusion dynamics in the CF field. Overall, the study offers a structure for analyzing the paths through which knowledge is diffused, enabling scholars to effectively manage a large volume of research papers and gain a deeper understanding of the historical, current, and future trends in the development of CF.

This paper aims to contribute to the scientific debate concerning the impact of equity crowdfunding on the performance of crowdfunded firms after campaigning. To this aim, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of the campaign and the subsequent firm innovativeness.

This study adopts a quantitative research approach to evaluate if the entrepreneurial choices affecting the characteristics of the equity crowdfunding campaigns have an impact on the post-campaign firm innovativeness.

The results of the models show that the campaign characteristics have a direct impact on the firm innovativeness, both in terms of offering and communication and the campaign performance.

This paper presents one of the first studies to investigate the relationship between the choice of campaign characteristics and the post-campaign firm innovativeness. As such, the study contributes to both the literature concerning start-up innovation and the literature about the impact of equity crowdfunding.