Academic fashion and crowdfunding: How to explain the craze for crowdfunding as a research topic

Abstract

Since Dushnitsky and Klueter’s paper on “an e-Bay for ideas” (2011), academic research on crowdfunding as a research topic in entrepreneurial finance has witnessed an exponential growth. Currently, about 28% of all papers in entrepreneurial finance are about crowdfunding (Wattelgroth et al. 2018). The academic interest in crowdfunding as a research topic largely exceeds the economic significance of crowdfunding as a mode of financing since only a tiny fraction of new business ventures’ funding has been raised though crowdfunding worldwide. For example, equity crowdfunding represented only 1.6% of the venture capital industry (Massolution, 2016; EY 2016). Hence the question we want to investigate in our current project is “How can we explain the ‘craze’ for crowdfunding as an academic research topic in entrepreneurial finance?”