Crowdfunding Towards the Future: The Need of Different Research Perspectives

Abstract

In serving as editor of this special issue of PIJ on crowdfunding, I want to pursue two main goals. Obviously, on the one hand, it is necessary to underline the relevance of each of the accepted papers hereafter published, thus presenting -from my point of view -the most fascinating contributes to the academic debate about this kind of financing channel. On the other, I think that it is even more useful for future research development to try to depict a possibly more open research agenda on this very wide phenomenon -crowdfunding -in light of the very uncertain future of our society and economy after the COVID-19 global pandemic.Let me start from this second goal which is linked to a kind of personal reflection about the social usefulness of our agenda in banking and finance research, learning and teaching interests or, more broadly, in all the social sciences and management fields. When the call for papers of this issue was issued, the research intention was to point out research trends and policy suggestions about crowdfunding developments in Europe. Due to the new socioeconomic situation Europe and the whole world must cope with after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the aim and the general research question have become wider in scope: what really is the contribution of crowdfunding to the recovery of the socio-economic environment in the near future? This question is, in my research experience, new with regard to urgence but not in terms of emergence. Since 2015, it was clear to me that (Previati, Galloppo and Salustri, 2015: 22):[…] crowdfunding is a very recent financial (and social) phenomenon all over the world. When we met at the beginning of our research effort, analysing the different topics and issues arising with reference to crowdfunding, we decided that an interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach was the best path to this phenomenon's understanding, from a theoretical and methodological point of view.

Crowdfunding from the perspective of young people

“…Social media is also a place that is widely used in text analysis and SNA research. Therefore, this study supports Previati's (2021) research, which suggests the need for new approaches in crowdfunding research, one of which is the SNA approach.…”

“…The results of this study demonstrated that, although it is not the main thing that young people pay attention to, some types of crowdfunding projects can attract young people to contribute. If these results are attributed to other factors in the same modularity, projects that appeal to young people can provide project confidence through the narratives built into those platforms (H. Zhou & Ye, 2019, 2021M. Zhou et al, 2018a).…”

“…Here, regression methods are particularly good for predicting the factors that create crowdfunding success, but with so many factors and models resulting from regression in previous studies, it can be challenging to determine the factors that make crowdfunding successful (Deng et al, 2022). Furthermore, some previous studies have employed the SNA approach to assess the propensity of a problem topic (Bernardino & Santos, 2020;Previati, 2021). This approach…”