Funding from the Crowd: An Internet-Based Crowdfunding Platform to Support Business Set-Ups from Universities

Abstract

This research-in-progress paper presents a research project that aims at developing, piloting and evaluating a crowdfunding platform to support financing for start-ups emerging from university. Currently, universities’ own financial resources to support setting up businesses from universities are limited. Universities’ business foundation consultancy can often only intermediate between entrepreneurs on the one side and restricted funding programs or few investors on the other side. A crowdfunding platform enables many individuals of the (university) crowd to support promising business ideas with little investments accumulating to a greater sum in total. Thus, it has the potential to extend universities’ opportunities to support entrepreneurs. In addition, tasks like idea communication, idea evaluation and investment decisions can be outsourced to the crowd. The idea, research setting, first results and a future outlook of this research project are discussed in this paper.

Keywords: Crowdfunding; entrepreneurship; start-ups