Sourcing ideas and funding for innovation and entrepreneurship from crowds
Two related projects studying the factors that stimulate crowds to participate in and contribute to sustainable innovation through crowdsourcing, as well as behaviour and preferences of the crowd.
Background
The ongoing digitalization development has enabled the exchange of various resources—such as technologies, designs, ideas, or money—between crowds of connected individuals and to organizations or to each other. This development was made possible thanks to the emergence of platforms that connected seekers of ideas or funds with those willing to provide then; these concepts are known as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, respectively. While crowdsourcing platforms create innovation eco-systems that can spark ideas for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding platforms help to ease the financial obstacles that entrepreneurs face in making these ideas into innovations.
Crowdsourcing / Qian Chen
As innovation is a driver for sustainable development, there is a clear need for firms to foster innovation in order to reach the economic and social-ecological goals of the sustainable development agenda. Consequently, many firms are today eager to find ideas that can be developed into sustainability-enhancing innovations through different approaches such as crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing, a method to capture and develop innovative ideas by collecting input from crowds in diverse areas on internet-based platforms, has shown to be of great value in solving complex innovation problems such as sustainable challenges. However, this is not necessarily easy as the factors that stimulate crowds to participate in and contribute to sustainable innovation are still not well understood. Furthermore, sustainability-oriented innovation ideas have a higher probability to be discarded during the innovation process and previous research has shown that these ideas, therefore, need specific support in order to be realized. Therefore, the motivation of idea generation and the selection of ideas for sustainability in crowdsourcing has been the main research aspects during my Postdoc research.
Regarding the motivation of idea generation, one paper titled ‘using emotional cues to induce prosocial crowdsourcing behavior- a key to environmental innovation? has been submitted and accepted in CINet 2021, a conference focused on continuous innovation’; Regarding the selection of ideas for sustainability, one paper titled ‘Selection bias of sustainability-oriented innovation ideas in internal crowdsourcing’ has been submitted to the Journal of decision support system in July, 2021. Further research might extend the collaboration with the area in crowdfunding, in order to explore the comments on the development and fundraising of sustainable-oriented ideas in crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding / Hadar Gafni
Obtaining finance for their ventures is a challenge that most entrepreneurs face. The demand for funding from venture capital funds, angel investors, and banks is never met in full, leaving countless of innovative ideas unrealized, promising business opportunities missed, and dreams shattered. Certain groups among the population of entrepreneurs find it even more difficult to realize their business ideas: women and microentrepreneurs in developing countries. They might be discriminated against, or simply be left out of the playing field, without any means to borrow or even save money. One solution comes in the form of the nascent digital technology of crowdfunding.
The purpose of my research is to enrich our understanding of this tool, and to find out if and how it can support female entrepreneurs and microentrepreneurs in securing the finance they need and establishing their own businesses. In particular, my papers study the behaviour and preferences of the crowd: whether they make their funding decisions based on the idea of the project or the entrepreneurial team behind it; whether they discriminate female entrepreneurs; whether they have prosocial preferences; whether they can even tell good projects from bad ones; as well as more questions. These papers have been published in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, and Review of Finance, and have been presented in many conferences and seminars around Europe.
Applied interdisciplinarity
Research about both idea management in crowdsourcing for sustainable innovation and crowdfunding draws on insights from research on sustainability, as well as information systems and information technology. Crowdfunding is a setting which makes a meeting point for several disciplines: being a funding mechanism is draws the interest of the finance community, who meets management scholars who look for the optimal way for entrepreneurs to raise this funding, some of them coming from marketing research. The platforms themselves are being analysed of professors of information systems, while economists aim to figure how the whole system works. Furthermore, the research on crowds utilizes advanced toolboxes developed by computer scientists and/or computational linguists, e.g. in the form of machine learning tools for automatic text analysis.
KTH Collaborations
Industrial Economics and Management󠄄
Machine Design
Duration
June 2020 – August 2022
Project participants
