Motivations to Contribute Financially to Crowdfunding Projects

Nowadays the idea of internally oriented and centralized research and development (R&D) practices has become obsolete. More and more companies are opting for an open innovation strategy, where they look outside their own organization and cooperate with other partners including research centres, companies or even directly the crowd. Besides crowdsourcing, a new way of integrating the crowd in a company’s innovation processes has emerged, namely crowdfunding. Crowdfunding allows creative individuals to receive funding for their ideas and start-ups from a large number of investors. Thus, crowdfunding contributes greatly to innovation by opening the funding and entrepreneurial process and enabling innovative ideas to be realized. In this chapter, the author contributes to the motivation literature and provides conceptual insights into the precise factors that drive the crowd to invest in a start-up and thus to become an integral part of its innovation process. Knowing the motivation of the crowd is of significant importance, considering that while open innovation has been well studied from a strategic point of view, the human aspect has been so far overlooked.