Alone or in Concert? Creative Entrepreneurs and the Role of Multiple Institutional Logics in Crowdfunding Pitches

Crowdfunding is a new digital platform that creative entrepreneurs can use to pitch their ideas to potential investors to attract resources to support their projects. We investigate how creative entrepreneurs construct crowdfunding pitches under conditions of multiple institutional logics and how the crowd how “the crowd” evaluates these attempts. While prior research has shown that straddling conflicting logics generates tensions inside organizations, we still know little about how external constituencies evaluate entrepreneurial ideas when multiple logics are at play. We focus on the aesthetic and business logics in crowdfunding pitches and analyze their role alone as well as in concert in mobilizing backers to financially support ideas in the creative industries. Analyzing a sample of ca. 500 digital games by indie developers and their pitching practices on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, including crowdfunding video pitches, our study shows that employing a hybrid approach to pitch creation in which both logics are deployed “in concert” discourages potential backers from supporting creative entrepreneurs. Instead, the business logic seems to be most beneficial for game creators whose ideas are at an early stage of development. Utilizing the aesthetic logic tends to be more effective at an advanced stage of development. The findings of our study hold important implications for the literature on entrepreneurship and institutional theory, as well as the creative industries and crowdfunding.