Effective entrepreneurial narrative design in reward crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures

One of the most important challenges for social venture entrepreneurs is acquiring resources. Reward crowdfunding is considered a suitable tool for meeting the financing needs of social ventures, whose backers are particularly interested in firm ideas and core values rather than in collaterals or business plans. A strategic factor that is able to influence the outcome of crowdfunding campaigns is the entrepreneurial narrative. Very few scholars have examined the key factors that support a crowdfunding campaign, particularly those on reward-based crowdfunding platforms, and the effects of entrepreneurial narratives on investors’ decisions. Aiming to fill this research gap, this paper investigates how entrepreneurs in the technology industry describe their social ventures and projects on Eppela, an Italian reward-based crowdfunding platform. Thematic analysis was applied to detect the five following key factors of effective entrepreneurial narratives in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures: 1) problem/need; 2) project; 3) product; 4) team; and 5) venture. Each key factor includes specific subfactors. Lexical data analysis was then performed to identify the following expected effects of the examined entrepreneurial narratives on potential investors, leading these investors to understand, trust, and approve the project proposal, and thus, finance the social venture’s project: 1) reassurance, 2) reliability, and 3) credibility. Based on these results, this study proposes an explanatory model about how to design effective entrepreneurial narratives to be presented to contribute as much as possible to the success of projects in crowdfunding platforms.

     

Robust effects of a debt-financed tax cut in an economy with incomplete markets

International Tax and Public Finance - We propose a two-period pure-exchange economy with spot and nominal security markets and a government that enacts a debt-financed tax cut in the first period...     

Adoption Gaps of Environmental Adaptation Technologies with Public Effects

Environmental and Resource Economics - As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) testifies, the world is a long way from halting climate change, let alone reverting it. The existence...     

The innovator's media dilemma: How journalists cover incumbents' adoption of discontinuous technologies

We offer a new vantage to the literature on the role of infomediaries in incumbent firms' struggles to adopt discontinuous technologies: the perspective of news media. Specifically, we combine the discontinuous technology literature with studies on news media journalism to theorize that journalists cover an incumbent's new product introductions differently, depending on whether a given new product builds on a discontinuous technology or on the respective established, continuous technology. First, discontinuous-technology-based product introductions receive a greater volume of coverage than continuous-technology-based product introductions because journalists prefer covering issues that are novel, deviate from the conventional, and potentially strongly impact society. Second, the coverage of discontinuous-technology-based product introductions is more divergent in tenor than the coverage of continuous-technology-based product introductions, as journalists seek to present opposing and thus more engaging opinions. Our analyses of unique archival data from two samples of product introductions in the automotive and photography industries, respectively, support our hypotheses. We also find intriguing indications that news media coverage of new products introductions using hybrid technologies is significantly context-dependent. Overall, our study points to so-far undescribed, media-related dilemmas for incumbent firms that aim to adopt discontinuous technologies.