HIGH-TECH ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN CROWDFUNDING: THE IMPLICATIONS OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES ON THE FORMATION OF HI-TECH VENTURES

Crowdfunding is a new concept of drawing funds for a variety of projects, allowing entrepreneurs to make use of a vast amount of investors, namely the consumers of their product. The rapid growth of crowdfunding leads to the assumption that it is not merely a short-lived phenomenon, but an interesting new concept with rising demand from both entrepreneurs and consumers alike. By using a dataset of over 56,600 projects attracting over US$ 1 billion in funding regarding crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, I will try to describe the challenges and prospects regarding crowdfunding. By first studying literature involving crowdfunding, entrepreneurship and a combination of the two, a deeper understanding and a link between the two disciplines will be established. Afterwards, an analysis regarding descriptive statistics of Technology-based crowdfunding projects will offer a means of setting high-tech entrepreneurs apart from other entrepreneurs in crowdfunding endeavours. I find that high-tech entrepreneurs are more successful and attract larger funding than other types of entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. A final conclusion and discussion offers last remarks regarding this research, and gives remarks regarding possible future research in the field.