The dependence of successful social crowdfunding on investor trust: research on enhancing factors

This thesis examines the importance of trust creation in crowdfunding. Along the case of Go Parity, a social crowdlending platform, measures to strengthen the trust of private investors are assessed. Hence, GoParity’s past achievements and current challenges with regards to trust cre ation are analysed. A survey consisting of 367 respondents, and 14 interviews constitute the research. Accordingly, solutions are developed, evaluated, and translated into recommenda tions, accompanied by an implementation plan. Subsequently, the focus is narrowed down to greenwashing in impact investment as one potential obstacle towards investor trust creation. In this respect, challenges, as well as improvement potential are explored

Equity crowdfunding as an alternative source of entrepreneurial finance

Equity-based Crowdfunding (EBC) has been playing an increasingly important role in financing entrepreneurial companies (Signori & Vismara, 2018). Project founders raise funds via online platforms, such as Crowdcube, which also gives project founders direct interaction with potential investors. Through their feedback, investors provide opinions of the business idea, which may prove useful in reshaping and improving the products or services. Although current research on equity-based crowdfunding has correlated various campaign and projects’ features to success, there is a lack of convincing conceptual framework that has the potential to incorporate the interplay of the different factors in crowdfunding. In particular, the extant literature has so far attempted to explain success in terms of project characteristics, generally ignoring the characteristics of fund structure and their interrelationship with project characteristics in the success (or failure) of equity crowdfunding. This thesis is aiming to address this gap by building upon signalling theory, goal setting theory and social capital theories to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework that incorporate projects characteristics, fundraising structure and their interplay in the EBC campaign. Hypotheses are developed based on the conceptual framework. The data of the thesis were collected from the 850 projects funded between 2011 and 2019 on EBC platform, Crowdcube, in UK. The data was analysed using a quantitative method, with the dataset being analysed using an Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and a series of robustness tests using a logistic regression to assess the reliability of my results. The result of this study found that higher firm age, more social media channels, and more management team members in project characteristics can contribute to the success of EBC campaigns, whilst lower funding target, less equity offered, and moderate investment threshold value to gain voting rights in fundraising characteristics can also contribute to the success of EBC campaigns. The results also suggest that project founders may establish a higher investment threshold value for investors to obtain voting rights if they are confident in the project's ability to create substantial cash flows or revenue in the future. Moreover, investors may waive their voting rights if project founders provide signals of higher-quality projects. More importantly, the result of this study found significant interaction effect between different factors, including firm age and social media, equity offered and social media, and equity offered and investment. The findings help to depict a complex web of interacting factors that when considered together, are contributing to the success of EBC. Through investigation of the factors of project characters and its fund structure characters in equity crowdfunding, this thesis assists project founders in setting up their crowdfunding campaign and investors screening out projects with growth potential and advances understanding of Crowdfunding, especially for equity crowdfunding

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices