دانلود رایگان مقاله فناوری نوظهور و دموکراتیزه کردن خدمات مالی

Abstract

Crowdfunding has grown quickly and attracted significant scholarly attention. However, the diverse approaches to crowdfunding that have emerged, as well as the uncertain relationship of these approaches to the umbrella concept of crowdsourcing, means it is not clear to what extent crowdfunding presents theoretically novel behaviours, nor what those behaviours may be. This study addresses this lack of clarity through a metatriangulation of 120 peer-reviewed studies on crowdfunding. These studies are distributed across the four dominant categories of crowdfunding, namely crowd lending, crowd equity, crowd patronage, and crowd charity. Research for each category is analysed separately to determine the topics of interest, the dominant theoretical perspectives, the methods employed, and the typical focus of analysis. We bridge these categories to identify three common variables relating to funding behaviours and three relating to impact. Of these, we argue that two are fundamentally novel and under-researched, namely the ‘erosion of organisations' financial boundaries’ and ‘paying to participate’. The implications of these findings are discussed for crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.

6. Summary and conclusions

This study has investigated whether crowdfunding presents genuinely new ideas and behaviours, or simply a migration of established practices into a new domain. The findings suggest the former and highlight several resulting theoretical challenges and opportunities. First, we identify two high-level concepts more-or-less unique to crowdfunding, i.e., paying to participate and the erosion of organisations' financial boundaries. The definition of these variables allows crowdfunding to be more carefully positioned and differentiated within its umbrella domain of peer production and crowdsourcing. For example, numerous studies of crowdsourcing have tried to make sense of participants' motivations where material incentivises are inadequate (e.g., Boudreau, Lacetera, & Lakhani, 2011; Zheng, Li, & Hou, 2011; Cahalane, Feller, Finnegan, Hayes, & O'Reilly, 2014) or even non-existent (e.g., Hars & Ou, 2001; Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003; Shah, 2006). Crowdfunding challenges these explanations to go further, as it creates circumstances where crowd members are not only volunteering time and effort (which may have otherwise been spent at leisure), they are assuming a tangible financial sacrifice to incentivise ‘sourcers’ to bring their projects or businesses into some shared space. Similarly, many scholars have sought to understand how organisations maintain their identity in light of decreasing knowledge and resource autonomy (e.g., Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003; Chesbrough, 2006; Afuah & Tucci, 2012). Crowdfunding potentially creates a type of customer/investor hybrid that further challenges traditional conceptual models of what it means to be an ‘organization’, not to mention concepts such as ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’. Second, as part of the metatriangulation we present a view of different categories of crowdfunding that positions them along two discriminatory theoretical dimensions (whether returns are definitive or uncertain and dynamic, and whether returns are fi- nancial or material/social). These may serve to clarify and inform the theoretical comparison of observations made in different types of crowdfunding systems, and so create a more cohesive and integrated field of study. This means that observations of crowd lending, for example, may be considered in terms of their implications for crowdfunding as a whole, rather than restricting discussion to solely the lending category. Such combined views are important if a cumulative body of work is to be maintained capable of keeping up with rapidly changing phenomena (DeLone & McLean, 1992; Benbasat & Zmud, 2003).