Journal of Service Management

Emerald Article: Crowd-funding: transforming customers into investors

through innovative service platforms
Andrea Ordanini, Lucia Miceli, Marta Pizzetti, A. Parasuraman

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Transforming
Crowd-funding: transforming customers into
customers into investors through investors
innovative service platforms
443
Andrea Ordanini, Lucia Miceli and Marta Pizzetti
Department of Marketing, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy, and Received August 2010
A. Parasuraman Revised December 2010
Accepted March 2011
Department of Marketing, University of Miami School of Business,
Coral Gables, Florida, USA

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emerging crowd-funding phenomenon, that is
a collective effort by consumers who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet,
in order to invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Successful service
businesses that organize crowd-funding and act as intermediaries are emerging, attesting to the
viability of this means of attracting investment.
Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a “grounded theory” approach,
performing an in-depth qualitative analysis of three cases involving crowd-funding initiatives:
SellaBand in the music business, Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in non-profit services.
These cases were selected to represent a diverse set of crowd-funding operations that vary in terms of
risk/return for the investor and the type of payoff associated to the investment.
Findings – The research addresses two research questions: how and why do consumers turn into
crowd-funding participants? and how and why do service providers set up a crowd-funding initiative?
Concerning the first research question, the authors’ findings reveal purposes, characteristics, roles and
tasks, and investment size of crowd-funding activity from the consumer’s point of view. Regarding the
second research question, the authors’ analysis reveals purposes, service roles, and network effects of
crowd-funding activity investigated from the point of view of the service organization that set up the
initiative.
Practical implications – The findings also have implications for service managers interested in
launching and/or managing crowd-funding initiatives.
Originality/value – The paper addresses an emerging phenomenon and contributes to service
theory in terms of extending the consumer’s role from co-production and co-creation to investment.
Keywords Crowd-funding, Service innovation, Investments, Customer-investors, Customers
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
While consumers have always had a special place in the marketing literature, the role
assigned to them has changed over time, concurrently with developments in marketing

The research received financial support from the “Customer and Service Science Lab” at
Bocconi University. The authors gratefully acknowledge the participants of the 2009 “Frontiers
Journal of Service Management
in Service Conference” for their feedback and suggestions during the presentation of an early Vol. 22 No. 4, 2011
version of this paper. The presentation was finalist for the Best Practitioner Presentation Award. pp. 443-470
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The authors also thank guest editors Lia Patricio and Ray Fisk, and three anonymous reviewers, 1757-5818
for their constructive comments and suggestions. DOI 10.1108/09564231111155079
JOSM theory and the evolution of markets. A mere target for the “functional school” of the
22,4 1970s (Barksdale and Darden, 1971), consumers become key information sources in the
“market orientation” literature (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990), co-producers according to
the “service marketing” literature (Fisk et al., 1993), partners for innovative purposes in
the “lead user” theory (von Hippel, 1986), and, finally, key resources and co-creators of
value in the “service-dominant logic (SDL)” perspective (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Over
444 the years, this trend has revealed an enrichment and empowerment of the role assigned
to consumers (Lusch et al., 2007).
In line with this tendency, the consumer’s role has recently expanded to include
investment support. This phenomenon, called crowd-funding, is a collective effort by
people who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet, in order to
invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations (Ordanini, 2009).
The idea that some people may decide to pay for producing and promoting a product
(instead of buying it), and bear the risk associated with that decision, represents a further
step in the evolution of consumers’ roles, that involves a mix of entrepreneurship and
social network participation. The selection of the initiatives to be supported, the monetary
investment from consumers, the outsourcing of entrepreneurial risk by the organization
that sets up the crowd-funding activity, and the blurring boundaries between marketing
and finance are only some of the new issues involved with crowd-funding initiatives.
Being new phenomena, crowd-funding initiatives and their consequences for firms
and consumers are not fully understood. For instance: what drives the engagement of
consumers as investors? What functions do crowd-funding service providers play?
Which roles do consumers play when they participate in crowd-funding platforms?
To address these issues, we employ a “grounded theory” approach (Eisenhardt,
1989) and perform an in-depth qualitative analysis of three representative cases
involving service innovations associated with crowd-funding initiatives: SellaBand in
the music business; Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in the context of
personal and social services. These businesses were selected because they represent a
diverse set of relevant crowd-funding operations that vary in terms of risk/return for
the consumer/investor and the type of consumer involvement.
Our analysis offers important insights into investor behavior in crowd-funding service
models, potential determinants of such behavior, and variations in behavior and
determinants across different service models. The contribution of the research is twofold.
First, we contribute to the marketing literature by improving our understanding of a new
role potentially played by the consumer, that of an investor. Our research derives a first set of
conditions that explain when and how potential consumers may consider taking on the role
of an investor and which activities they perform. Second, we offer insights for service
managers interested in launching and/or managing crowd-funding initiatives. Our findings
shed light on the purposes and activities pertaining to crowd-funding models, and the latter’s
influence of service-value networks.

The crowd-funding phenomenon

Crowd-funding is an initiative undertaken to raise money for a new project proposed by
someone, by collecting small to medium-size investments from several other people
(i.e. a crowd) (Ordanini, 2009). Different players are involved in crowd-funding models.
First, there are the subjects who propose ideas and/or projects to be funded. These people
want to use crowd-funding to get direct access to the market and to gather financial
support from truly interested supporters. Then there is the crowd of people that decide to Transforming
financially support these projects, bearing a risk and expecting a certain payoff. These customers into
supporters co-produce the output, selecting – and sometimes developing – the offers
they deem to be most promising or interesting. A third player is the crowd-funding investors
organization, which brings together those who want to deliver the new initiatives using
crowd-funding mechanisms and those who may wish to support such initiatives
through their investment efforts. Crowd-funding has been boosted by recent 445
technological developments – Web 2.0 in particular – that offer new opportunities
and scenarios where consumers can use, create and modify content and interact with
other users through social networks.
Crowd-funding models have precedents. Collecting small amounts of money from
many people has a history in the sphere of charity and social cooperation,
but crowd-funding extends this model, because the money is invested by consumers
to obtain a return, mostly financial, but sometimes intangible (e.g. status, social esteem,
identification, etc.). Second, crowd-funding models include elements of crowd-sourcing
frameworks (Dell, 2008), in which the members of a community share ideas to solve a
problem or pool their efforts to create favorable exchange conditions for the
community’s benefit. However, in crowd-funding, it is not idea generation or bargaining
power that emerges from the crowd’s collective efforts; instead, what the crowd
generates is financial support for already proposed initiatives. The crowd-funding
mechanism is also related to social networking, where consumers actively participate in
online communities to share information, knowledge and suggestions about a new
initiative and/or brand. However, crowd-funding goes beyond conventional
social-network participation by incorporating more proactive roles for consumers,
such as selecting new initiatives to support and providing financial backing for them.
Therefore, crowd-funding, although sharing some characteristics of traditional
resource-pooling and social-networking phenomena, has some unique elements
related to creating service platforms through which individual consumers can pool
monetary resources to support and sustain new projects initiated by others.
Crowd-funding initiatives are surfacing in a variety of markets. In the music sector,
crowd-funding makes possible connections between music lovers and artists. Music
lovers can choose to contribute funds to a favorite artist or music group, who can then
record a professional album when the collective funding level reaches a specified target.
SellaBand, Slicethepie, and Bandstocks are examples of crowd-funding platforms for
the music industry that enable new and established artists to raise money directly
from music fans. Similar crowd-funding models have been used to finance independent
movies. Artemis Eternal and El Cosmonauta are two movie projects in which patrons
can become co-producers of the movie by investing a small amount of money.
Crowd-funding initiatives are also being used fund fashion designers. Cameesa,
a clothing company based in Chicago, was the first site to pioneer “crowd-funding
fashion.” In Cameesa, the designers submit their T-shirt designs, and supporters choose
their favorite design and fund it with a minimum amount of $10. When the cumulative
funding for a proposed design reaches a target of $500, the T-shirt is produced and goes
on sale on the web site. Another example of this type is Catwalkgenius, where
designers can upload images of their existing collections for a wide range of products
(clothes, jewelry, lingerie, shoes, etc.). Potential supporters check out the collection,
JOSM choose their favorites and invest in them. Profits from the sales of the chosen offerings
22,4 are shared among the designer, Catwalkgenius, and supporters.
Yet another application of crowd-funding is in the financial sector. Trampoline
Systems, a social analytics software house, is attempting to raise 1 million pounds from
up to 100 investors through crowd-funding in order to finance the development and
commercialization of solutions and applications related to its software. MyBar is another
446 example of applying this innovative approach to raise capital. The aim of this project is to
build a bar in Beirut owned by a crowd of investors. The board of directors ensures the
right mix of owners by interviewing each potential investor, who can then buy “Barnotes”
or memberships for prices ranging from $2,000 to $20,000. Grow VC recently used the
crowd-funding model to help startup entrepreneurs find capital for their businesses.
The aim of Grow VC is to provide a platform for mobile and Web 2.0 startup companies
that connects them with investors, and to offer tools to help entrepreneurs efficiently
communicate and manage ideas in order to reach successful funding outcomes.
Finally, the crowd-funding model has been also used for collecting money for
non-profits. Fundable, CreateaFund, and Kapipal are examples of web sites on which
people can create pages to collect money for any project, from charity in the strict sense
of the word to personal projects or gifts. In this context, the web site works as a
platform that enables donors to give money to their pet projects or causes.

Background literature and research questions

Some extant literature streams are helpful in providing an appropriate backdrop for
understanding crowd-funding, although insights from each stream only address some
but not all aspects of this emerging phenomenon. The service marketing literature has a
long tradition in highlighting the customer’s role in service provision (Zeithaml, 1981;
Murray, 1991; Bitner et al., 1997; Blazevic and Lievens, 2008). Each act of the service
delivery always includes a certain degree of customer participation (Dabholkar, 1990;
Meuter et al., 2000), which may involve providing information to the service
organization, or more direct involvement in the service provision itself (Lengnick-Hall,
1996; Fang, 2008). While customer participation may contribute to greater efficiency,
better customization, and improved experience, it also has some drawbacks for
consumers, such as increased uncertainty and responsibility over the outcome
(Bendapudi and Leone, 2003). While the aforementioned facets of customer participation
are relevant to crowd-funding as well, customers involved in crowd-funding are not only
integrated in the service delivery phase, but also contribute to the design and set up the
entire crowd-funding offering (Edvardsson and Olsson, 1996; Moeller, 2008). One of
crowd-funding’s foundational and distinguishing traits is that customers, with their
evaluative decisions and monetary support, are the key players who make possible the
generation of the offering. Moreover, while service marketing theory focuses on contexts
where the individuals participating in the service provision and in consuming the service
are the same, in crowd-funding the customer-participants help in developing an offering
(i.e. funding) that is later consumed by someone else.
Lead user theory (von Hippel, 1986) and open innovation literature (Chesbrough,
2003) do focus on customer involvement in developing new offerings intended for other
customers at large. Both propose that some users have the ability to anticipate needs
months or years before they are evident in the marketplace, and that firms can capitalize
on such lead users sense of innovation and expertise in developing successful
new products (von Hippel and Katz, 2002). However, although lead users reflect some Transforming
characteristics of participants in crowd-funding initiatives (e.g. scouting and screening customers into
of ideas seeking funds), it should be noted that lead users are scarce and invariably only
a few of them can be involved in innovation because of coordination constraints investors
(Lilien et al., 2002). In contrast, another foundational trait of crowd-funding models
is that a relatively large number of people participated in deciding what should
be offered. 447
Other literature streams, such as those focusing on open source (Lakhani and
von Hippel, 2003) and crowd-sourcing phenomena (Kleemann et al., 2008) share some
features with crowd-funding. In an open source setting, production and development
aspects of an offering are outsourced to potentially many people who are given access to
the offering’s source materials (von Krogh and Spaeth, 2007), while in crowd-sourcing a
job is outsourced in the form of an open call to a large but undefined group of people
(Howe, 2006). In both these contexts, a crowd of people collaboratively contribute to
some aspect of the production process or the solution to a design issue or problem. The
crowds participating in open sourcing and crowd-sourcing are motivated by such things
as learning, direct compensation, self-promotion, and social benefits (Leimeister et al.,
2009). Crowd-funding models, however, require participants to not only contribute
knowledge and effort but also to play promotional and investment roles in support of the
initiatives being crowd-funded; this more extensive different type of participation is
likely to be driven by other types of motivations.
The literature on brand community also suggests some aspects that relate to
crowd-funding contexts. This literature that suggests consumers who are deeply
involved with a brand that offers them symbolic benefits, can develop “a common
understanding of a shared identity” (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001, p. 413) and actively
engage in activities such as new product development, quality reassurance, experience
sharing, and joint consumption (Ouwersloot and Oderkerken-Schroder, 2008).
Brand-community members are typically motivated by fun, learning, identification,
and status, especially when the activity is shared in social networks (Bagozzi and
Dholakia, 2006). They may use online communities to generate “a process of collective
value creation” (Schau et al., 2009, p. 30). However, again, the literature on brand
community does not capture the element of monetary support from users, which is a
key characteristic of crowd-funding models.
One literature stream that does reflect the element of monetary support is the
literature on donor behavior (Guy and Patton, 1989; Kotler and Andreasen, 1991;
Cermak et al., 1994). This literature suggests that people who contribute to charitable
causes are motivated by self-esteem, public recognition, satisfaction of expressing
gratitude for one’s own wellbeing, and relief from feelings of guilt and obligation
(Hibbert and Horne, 1996; White and Peloza, 2009). In a similar fashion, the literature
on microfinance (Rutherford, 2000) highlights the role of crowds in trying to sustain
small projects having a social meaning. However, these literature streams focus
exclusively on donors motivated by non-economic benefits, and are not capable to
explain the majority of crowd-funding initiatives that involve monetary payoffs and
risks for the participants.
Although the marketing literature discusses risk and uncertainty from a
customer’s perspective, those discussions focus on risks associated with purchase
and product-choice decisions (e.g. the risk of receiving inappropriate products
JOSM (Dowling and Staelin, 1994)), rather than on risks concerning investment decisions
22,4 supporting the generation of the offering, which is a key feature of crowd-funding
models. The literature on private equity does address investment risks. In particular,
the phenomenon of “business angels” appears to relate to crowd-funding initiatives,
because it represents situations in which a few individuals, who possess liquidity and
expertise and operate outside of formal financial institutions, provide funding for
448 entrepreneurial ventures proposed by someone else (Freear et al., 1994). This informal
venture-capital activity is motivated by economic goals, as well as by hedonic and
altruistic considerations (Sullivan and Miller, 1996). However, the activity of business
angels typically involves only a few experienced people who are accustomed to sharing
investment opportunities with close friends and business associates (Wetzel, 1983), and
not large groups of potential participants that are involved in crowd-funding projects.
As such, the cost (and associated risk) per investor-participant in a crowd-funding
initiative is significantly lower than in the case of traditional venture-capital-funded
projects (Ordanini, 2009).
The literature on network organizations offers some insights pertaining to the
structure of service firms that facilitate crowd-funding by bringing together customers –
who are the key players by virtue of their roles in the selection of projects and the
provision of monetary support for the selected projects – and the seekers of funding
(i.e. project-proposal initiators) in an online network structure. However, the extant
literature in this domain only partially explains the structure of crowd-funding models.
For instance, both marketing (Achrol and Kotler, 1999) and management (Parkhe et al.,
2006) literature streams discuss the growing trend of firms’ organizing their activities
through dispersed networks. In such networks some players act as “orchestrators”
of the network without playing a direct role in specific activities (Iansiti and Levien,
2004). While the orchestrator metaphor is in line with the role of the service firms that
facilitate crowd-funding, bringing together project proposers and potential funders,
the investment role of customers, a fundamental trait of crowd-funding models, has not
been considered a key element of such organizational networks.
Finally, the emerging SDL (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008) has introduced the idea
that consumers should be considered as resource integrators in service systems, thus
extending the role of consumers in the service value networks. However, even the most
recent contributions in the realm of SDL (Lusch et al., 2010), do not consider the
possibility of consumers playing an active role in value networks by virtue of their
investment activities.
In summary, while several extant literature streams are relevant for
understanding some aspects of the crowd-funding phenomenon, either from the
perspective of participating consumers or that of the service firm that organizes and
facilitates the activity, each stream only offers a limited set of insights pertaining to
just a single or narrow facet of this nascent phenomenon. There is a lack of a unifying
conceptual framework for enhancing our understanding of crowd-funding, and for
providing managerial guidance and directions for further research related to this
phenomenon.
The purpose of our study is to attempt to fill the aforementioned knowledge gap by
developing and discussing a overarching framework that captures and synthesizes the
key characteristics of different types of crowd-funding initiatives. Specifically, our
study addresses two broad research questions:
 RQ1. How and why do consumers turn into crowd-funding participants? Transforming
RQ2. How and why do service providers set up a crowd-funding initiative? customers into
investors
Methodology
Given the novelty of the phenomenon under investigation, and the inductive nature of
our research questions, we employed a qualitative, case-based approach in our 449
research. Such an approach to research facilitates the exploration of a phenomenon
within its context, using a variety of data sources (Yin, 2003b). It is based on the
constructivist paradigm, according to which truth is relative and dependent on one’s
perspective: hence, there should be a collaboration between researchers and
participants, enabling the latter to tell their stories and describe their views of
reality, so the researcher can better understand the participants’ actions (Spiggle, 1994).
The case-study approach is especially appropriate for addressing “how” and “why”
questions (Meredith, 1998; Yin, 2003b). Its usefulness is magnified when the research
objective is to achieve deeper understanding of a novel phenomenon, the concepts and
contexts pertaining to which are ill-defined because of a lack of previous theory
(Eisenhardt, 1989), and when the phenomenon has not yet received adequate coverage
in the extant literature (Yin, 2003b). Crowd-funding exhibits the above features and,
therefore, we considered the case-based approach to be suitable for investigating it.
A case-study analysis:
[. . .] typically uses multiple methods and tools for data collection from a number of entities by
a direct observer(s) in a single, natural setting that considers temporal and contextual aspects
of the contemporary phenomenon under study, but without experimental controls or
manipulations (Meredith, 1998, pp. 442-3).
Given the variety and complexity of current crowd-funding initiatives, we studied
multiple cases in order to have sufficient robustness to capture the diversity and
distinct characteristics of the observational units of analysis (i.e. the different
crowd-funding platforms) and the explanatory units of analysis (i.e. the drivers of
investor behavior and the activities of the service organizations that orchestrate the
crowd-funding initiatives) (Ragin, 1987). Our research methodology paralleled the
steps proposed by Yin (2003a) for conducting multiple-case-study research:
.
definition of the content;
.
case selection;
.
data collection;
. interview protocol;
.
data analysis; and
.
findings and discussion.

The first five steps of the methodology are described in this section. Findings and
discussion are presented in subsequent sections.

Definition of analysis content

Our qualitative analysis seeks “analytical generalization,”, i.e. we build upon
previously developed theory as a template against which to compare the results
JOSM of our empirical study (Tellis, 1997). This part of the methodology describes the
22,4 problem under investigation, and justifies the use of a qualitative case-based approach
to address the research issues. In order to properly address our research questions,
data collection focused on two broad areas:
(1) motivations and roles of consumers participating to crowd-funding initiatives;
and
450 (2) objectives of and roles played by service firms organizing the crowd-funding
initiatives.

The first part of the analysis addresses RQ1, dealing with consumer involvement in
crowd-funding initiatives. Specifically, it aims to shed light on the characteristics of the
participating individuals, the motivations that drive them to participate, the activities
they perform in crowd-funding, and the process through which the target investment is
reached.
The second part of the analysis shifts the perspective to firms that organize the
crowd-funding initiative, and addresses RQ2. Its objectives are to identify the firms’
motivations for setting up a business model based on crowd-funding, the different roles
they play, and the structural effects of crowd-funding on service-supply chains.

Case selection
We selected cases using the “theoretical replication logic” to produce contrasting
results in a cross-case fashion (Yin, 2003b). Based on this principle, and in order to find
a balance between consistency and variation, we chose cases that had in common
certain crowd-funding features, but also included sufficient contextual and structural
diversity (Corbin and Strauss, 1990; Flick, 2006). During the case-selection process,
we endeavored to ensure that the selected cases covered all theoretically relevant
categories of the phenomenon under investigation.
A novel and defining characteristic of crowd-funding is that it involves consumers
who act as investors, providing monetary support to others’ proposals and expecting
some payoffs (either monetary or non-monetary). As such, our sample selection was
guided by insights from the theory of the investment behavior of individuals (Copeland
and Weston, 1988; Hansen and Schrader, 1997; McLachlan and Gardner, 2004),
together with extensive information we gathered from secondary sources (e.g. press
reports about crowd-funding and information available at crowd-funding web sites).
In particular, our case selection was based on two primary criteria related to
investment behavior (Iyer and Kashyap, 2009):
(1) the risk/return ratio associated with the monetary investment, which is a proxy
for the depth of investment requested of individuals; and
(2) the type of payoff expected by the consumer/investor (i.e. purely monetary rewards
or those involving non-monetary elements such symbolic or social value).

Based on the aforementioned investment criteria and the information, we gathered

from secondary sources, three types of crowd-funding initiatives seemed to emerge:
(1) models characterized by high levels of risk/return with predominantly
material payoffs for consumers, whose activity is close to that of venture
capitalists;
 (2) models characterized by a low-to-medium risk/return ratio with a broader set of Transforming
potential payoffs for customers, including emotional rewards; and customers into
(3) models with little or no risk for customers who expect only non-material payoff investors
and which are closer to charitable activities.

Figure 1 shows the three most prominent types of crowd-funding initiatives, along
with a list of service firms whose current operations fall under each type. 451
Within each type, we selected one case whose current structure and activities
we considered to be most robust and relevant for our study (the three selected
cases are emphasized in Figure 1): SellaBand (www.Sellaband.com), Trampoline
(www.trampolinesystem.com), and Kapipal (www.kapipal.com). These three start-ups
have developed diverse crowd-funding service platforms with varying degrees of
sophistication, and have garnered favorable reactions from consumers.
SellaBand applies the crowd-funding model to the music market. The mission of this
Bocholt (Germany)-based company is “to unite Artists and Fans in an independent
movement that aims to level the playing field in the global music industry.” It was
one of the first crowd-funding initiatives to appear on the market (active since August
2006), and one of the most cited by the press. Since its launch, SellaBand has realized
recording sessions for almost 40 artists whose albums were funded by their fans. Over
$3,000,000 has been invested in artists via SellaBand.com. Currently, there are almost
3,000 artists to support and more than 60,000 potential believers registered on the web site.
Through the online platform, artists can raise the money from the SellaBand
community in order to record a professional album. Artists upload their music and
profile, and music lovers can select artists they like and believe in. Anyone can invest
in a SellaBand artist. Once an artist reaches the investment target, the album is
recorded and all those who have invested receive a free limited edition copy of the CD
and a share of the revenues generated by the artists. The investment target is decided
by the artists, who have the freedom to choose not only the target budget but also the
incentives for the “believers” (label used for consumer-investors) and the percentage of
revenues shared with them. Initially, established for unsigned artists trying to promote

Risk/return
intensity
Grow vc
High my bar
trampoline Bandstocks
cameesa
catwalkgenius
sellaband
slicethepie Artemis eternal
kapial
Low move one-actblue
my football club
spot us
Figure 1.
Crowd-funding models
Material Emotional
according to risk/return
Type of payoff intensity and type of
payoff
Note: Sample selection criteria
JOSM their first album, recently SellaBand has opened up to established artists, and has
22,4 introduced more opportunities for revenue sharing and for accommodating different
types of music projects such as music tours and live concerts.
Trampoline is a more recent case, launched in Spring 2009, and represents the first
example of crowd-funding in the financial sector. The Trampoline crowd-funding
platform is associated with a London (UK)-based technology company. This firm sells
452 a software program, called SONAR, which is able to understand each employee’s
expertise and map relationships inside a corporation, analyzing e-mail, blogs, and other
data in order to enhance employees’ skills. Trampoline aims to financially support the
commercial application of this software using a crowd-funding model, instead of using
the conventional model of raising money from venture capitalists.
Trampoline is the first technology-based firm to use the crowd-funding process.
Its goal is to raise one million pounds from investors, with a minimum investment
of e10,000. Trampoline has worked closely with legal advisors in order to ensure its
crowd-funding process complies with the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA)
regulations. People who wanted to invest in the Trampoline project need to be certified
as high net worth individuals or sophisticated investors in order to meet FSA
qualifications. Within about two months from the launch of the crowd-funding project,
Trampoline was close to completing the first stage of fund raising, having collected
about half a million pounds.
Kapipal, launched in 2009, is a web site that allows people to collect money for any
purpose, from a group purchase to charity, from a personal project to a birthday or
wedding present. Kapipal is a start-up of Tailmedia, an Italian company specializing
in Web 2.0. A Kapipalist (a person who wants to collect money on Kapipal) can create a
web page and manage the money collection by setting the target amount, the duration
of collection and the reason why she/he is asking for money. Once the page is created,
the URL address is shared with friends and anyone else who might contribute. The
Kapipalist can decide to create a public or private fundraising page. If private, the page is
not visible to search engines, and is only navigable by those who know the URL address.
If instead the page is public, Google and other search engines may access it and include it
in their search results.
Whoever decides to donate money through Kapipal is called a contributor.
Contributors visit the page and decide how much money to send. Every contribution is
a donation, and usually there is no material return for the contributor, although one
may be proposed. Kapipal does not charge a fee. It merely acts as a connector between
Kapipalists and contributors. Since its launch, Kapipal has raised more than
$300,000, mainly for personal fundraising, for everything from birthday gifts,
to wedding lists, to medical treatment.

Data collection
We organized our qualitative data collection from a variety of data sources, following
Yin (2003a). Using multiple data sources is a fundamental aspect of the analysis
because it ensures the variety of perspectives required by the constructivist principles
on which qualitative analyses are based.
The data analyzed include both primary data, gathered through in-depth interviews,
as well as secondary data taken from internal company records, company web sites,
press reports and other published sources. The extensive desk research we conducted
to collect secondary data resulted in 35 pages of internal documentation that our Transforming
research team studied to gain a good understanding of the crowd-funding phenomenon customers into
in general as well as the main features of the three crowd-funding initiatives under
investigation. The documentation from the secondary research was also helpful in investors
designing the interview protocols we used in our primary data collection, and in
providing context for interpreting the data gathered from our interviews.
Detailed semi-structured interviews with key informants in the three selected 453
firms constituted a significant portion of our data collection effort. We performed
seven in-depth interviews with the founders and other managers of SellaBand
(three interviews in total), Trampoline (two interviews), and Kapipal (two interviews).
The interviewees were selected on the basis of their high involvement with and
knowledge about the crowd-funding initiatives. The total number of respondents was
sufficient to achieve saturation, in that the emergent categories and relationships
tended to converge and were thus “saturated” (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).

Interview procedure
The interview protocol we used is detailed in the Appendix. Consistent with
recommendations in the literature (Yin, 2003a), we designed the protocol to cover the
main topics pertaining to the research questions, but at the same time leaving room to
both the respondent and the researcher to extend the discussion to other unexpected
issues. We also ensured that the respondents were free to interpret each question from
their own perspectives as required in this type of research (Yin, 2003a).
Since qualitative inquiry is necessarily an iterative process, the question wording
changed slightly over the course of the interviews and evolved over time. Moreover,
some of the questions were added to capture additional issues that surfaced during
discussions in the early interviews. Because the interviews were only semi-structured,
and in order to accommodate interconnections among topics that might emerge
naturally during the interviews (Fontana and Frey, 2000), in some instances deviations
from the ordering of questions shown in the Appendix occurred.
Each interview lasted approximately two hours, with at least two members of the
research team present. Interviews were conducted both personally (five) and by
telephone (via Skype) (two) from July 2009 to November 2010. The interviews were
tape recorded to minimize data loss. The recordings were immediately transcribed for
subsequent analysis and shared with other members of the research team in both full
and excerpted form. Overall, the research team developed 86 pages of interview
transcripts. Informal follow-up questions were sent to some respondents to clarify and
refine issues that emerged during the transcription, often through e-mail exchange.
To enhance the reliability of the information derived from the interviews and to
strengthen support for the constructs and relationships emerging from our analysis,
we triangulated the interview information with the previously described secondary
data, as recommended by Eisenhardt (1989). We also continuously monitored the firms’
web sites, to keep abreast of available projects and their investment flows, as well as
consumer participation and web site improvements. Throughout the project we also
kept track of news published about crowd-funding in general and about the particular
web sites analyzed.
Consistent with the recommendations of Eisenhardt (1989), the research team spent
considerable time as a group sharing impressions and interpretations in order to achieve
JOSM a consensus view of the consumer’s role as investor (RQ1) and the organizational
22,4 structure of crowd-funding initiatives (RQ2). Discussion sessions consisted of
face-to-face meetings, conference calls, e-mails, and interpretative documents such as
PowerPoint plots sent as attachments. The impression- and interpretation-sharing
period lasted over three months, from the last interview to the attainment of consensus
concerning the study’s basic findings.
454
Data analysis
Consistent with grounded theory, we employed two key data analysis processes:
coding and categorizing (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). In coding we broke down the
interview data into interpretable units and compared them, while in categorizing we
organized the units into meaningful categories to facilitate conceptual development.
Our coding, again consistent with grounded theory, was an iterative, inductive process
from which we constructed descriptive summaries of the basic facts in order to “gain
familiarity with data and preliminary theory investigation” and “to look beyond initial
impressions and see evidence through multiple lenses” (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 533).
We used the coded and categorized data to perform a thematic content analysis
through an inductive process in which we progressed from categorization to
abstraction, comparison, and integration as recommended by Spiggle (1994).
Specifically, all authors participated in categorizing the case-study data (interview
transcripts and secondary data) into content themes related to crowd-funding, followed
by abstracting higher order conceptual constructs from the content-theme categories.
This iterative, inductive process ultimately resulted in seven categories nested into two
higher order dimensions broadly related to the two research questions (Table I,
column 1). We used the resulting broad categorization to compare and contrast the
three crowd-funding cases, and to identify and summarize the similarities/differences
among them (Table I, columns 2-4). Finally, we moved to conceptual integration, which
involved lengthy discussions about the different emerging themes and led to the
implications stemming from our analysis. Because some authors had developed a close

SellaBand Trampoline Kapipal

Crowd-funding participants
Purposes Patronage Investment Social participation
Characteristics Innovative orientation Innovative orientation Innovative
orientation
Identification (dominant) Identification Identification
(dominant)
Exploitation Exploitation (dominant)
Roles and tasks Agent: selection and Shareholder: growth and Donor: help
promotion development
Investment size Small, but potentially Large Small
significant
Crowd-funding firm
Purposes Empower artist and fans Raise alternative venture capitalFund social
projects online
Table I. Service roles Relational mediator Engine of growth Social gatekeeper
Main findings from Network effects Substitute an existing Disintermediate from an existing Add a new
the analysis intermediary intermediary intermediary
relationship with the three companies whereas other authors remained more distant, Transforming
there was some “interpretive tension,” which enriched and strengthened the integration customers into
process (Blazevic and Lievens, 2008).
investors
Findings and discussion
The key findings from our analysis are summarized in Table I, which organizes the
findings according to our conceptual categories and research questions. 455
Crowd-funding participants
Purposes. Consumers participating in our crowd-funding cases seem to have different
motivations for their participation and decision to invest. In SellaBand, consumers’
desire to participate is motivated primarily by the opportunity to be actively involved
in making a recording possible through their financial support. According to a
SellaBand manager, by investing in an artist:
[. . .] you (the consumers) do not only buy music, you also buy the idea that you have made it
possible, you are the one that discovered the artist, so you are part of the whole thing.
Here, patronage – the support, encouragement, and financial help that an individual
bestows another – seems to emerge as key purpose of the crowd-funding participation.
In contrast, the main purpose that drives consumers’ engagement in crowd-funding
initiatives organized by Kapipal can be labeled as social participation. Kapipal’s
founder calls this element “participation spirit,” underlining a desire to be taking part
in something that helps a friend or someone else needing money for a social or a
personal cause. According to the founder:
Either in the case of social initiatives, where the charitable dimension dominates, or for more
personal initiatives, the Kapipalist feels a strong sense of belongingness to the initiative, and
gets satisfied because he senses the project is achieved, thanks to his contribution.
In Trampoline, people who participate in crowd-funding are instead motivated by the
idea of realizing a monetary return from their investment, and contribute a non-trivial
amount of money to a new way of funding an early-stage new venture. In this case, the
participants are attracted by the novelty of the crowd-funding model, but it is the
economic return that appears as the main reason for the investment, because they can
become shareholders of the company. According to Trampoline’s founder:
[. . .] [although] people (participants) are telling us that we’ve been an innovator in our way of
raising finance [. . .] [they are attracted] because there is a potential to make very good returns
on their investments.
Characteristics. Some characteristics of consumer-investors in crowd-funding surfaced
consistently in the three cases. All interview respondents agreed that consumers
participate in crowd-funding web sites because they like engaging in innovative
behavior. Although interested in the content of the crowd-funding initiative, these
participants are attracted by the novel way to use the underlying technology platform,
particularly in the context of social networking. They perceive the potential of the
crowd-funding business model, but they decide to invest because they want to be first,
and they like the idea of using highly interactive tools. A Trampoline manager
described these people as being “experience investors”; a SellaBand executive said that
“they are innovators in the way they use technology to interact”; and Kapipal’s founder
JOSM said that “while charity always existed, many people are attracted not only by to whom
they donate and for what reason, but also by how to do it.”
22,4 In contrast, the presence and prevalence of other participant characteristics varied
across the three cases. A significant proportion of crowd-funding participants in both
SellaBand and Kapipal shared a strong sense of identification with the proponents
and/or projects being funded. In these cases, crowd-funding is a way to contribute to a
456 cause in which participants believe, and typically people with the highest levels of
identification are the first ones to invest. A manager from SellaBand described them as
“real dedicated people, really connected with the artist; for them the return on investment
is not the main driver,” and the Kapipal founder said that “the idea of making it possible,
being part of it, having a connection with the project is what matters.”
Another participant characteristic emerging from our interviews is economic
exploitation, the inclination of those who decide to invest in crowd-funding mainly for
the monetary payoff. This characteristic did not surface in the Kapipal interviews,
since Kapipal projects rarely involve monetary returns. However, it was dominant in
the case of Trampoline and, to a lesser extent, in the SellaBand case. These investors do
not have any inherent interest in or attachment to the content of the crowd-funding
initiative, other than as a means for gaining a monetary payoff from their financial
support. For instance, according to one of our interviewees in Trampoline (wherein the
firm actually subjects potential participants to a screening and qualification phase):
Since our crowd-funding mechanism attracts people who are mainly interested in the
potential monetary reward, and, given the importance of the involved sum, only persons who
meet the UK Financial Security Authority qualification criteria as qualified investors are
eligible to participate.
Roles and tasks. Our findings reveal the existence of different roles played by
crowd-funding participants. In SellaBand, the “believers” basically act as agents of the
artists, selecting, and promoting offerings that merit patronage, and being rewarded
with a royalty on future sales. In contrast to traditional music –industry practice,
where “a small and select group of people in the music industry were deciding which
artists were allowed to record an album” and “more and more artists were not able to
record (their)album,” SellaBand creates the conditions for consumers to discover new
artist and to “hear the music they wanted [to hear].”
In Trampoline, the main activity is that of supporting the growth and development
of the initiative by contributing, as a shareholder and potential entrepreneur, to the
future decisions of the company. As the founder of Trampoline pointed out, the
investor gains ownership of the company and “will have ordinary shares with full
voting rights, [. . .] therefore they will have authority in the governance structure of the
company” and “we (Trampoline) welcome investors’ input into product strategy.”
In contrast to both SellaBand and Trampoline participants, the primary role played
by Kapipalists is that of helping in the realization of a small project, and the consumer
who contributes is mainly a donor because she/he gives money without necessarily
expecting or receiving any monetary reward. As Kapipal’s web site emphasizes,
“all money transfers are donations and there is no (economic) return for contributors.”
Investment size. Looking at the investment process, the analysis reveals differences
in the levels of monetary effort, i.e. investment size, required for crowd-funding
participation across our three cases. Kapipal does not have a minimum target for
individual investment and, given the social content of the projects, it largely attracts
participants aiming to contribute for a small amount of money. At the other extreme, Transforming
Trampoline initiatives require a minimum, relatively large, level of investment for customers into
participating. This, of course, reflects the venture-capital nature of this Trampoline
investments. SellaBand does ask for a low minimum investment in order to participate investors
($10); however, a one manager told us “there are situations in which, especially when
the target is going to be reached, people decide to invest more than $1000.”
Findings from our analysis also suggest that, regardless of the differences in the 457
required investment size per participant, the overall investment path, reflecting the
collective investment behavior of consumers’ over time, seems to follow a similar pattern
in all three cases. This common pattern is portrayed by Figure 2, which plots the typical
growth trajectory of the cumulative amount of investment ( y-axis) over time (x-axis).
As Figure 2 shows, the cumulative investment process has three distinct phases.
The first phase is characterized by a quick and significant flow of investment that
reaches approximately half of the target capital. This rapid accumulation is mainly due
to the investment decisions of persons who are directly connected to the project or
connected to the network of the project creator. Our informants depicted this as the
“friend-funding” phase. The emphasis in this phase is on the project’s novelty, and the
high involvement of people who are close to the proponent facilitates the accumulation
of investment. However, achieving the final target once the initial phase is over is a
more challenging task.
The second stage of the process is characterized by a slow-down in investment
growth. Sustaining the project at this stage calls for triggering a cascading process to
continue the funding, by motivating and involving other people through
word-of-mouth communications. We labeled this phase “getting the crowd” because,
as Trampoline’s CEO stated during our interview, in this phase:
[. . .] it is the social networks of people who are involved in the business and recommendations
made from person to person through the networks [. . .] can make the difference in this case.

Target

Engagement
moment

Phase 3
Investment

race to be“in”
Phase 2
getting the crowd

Phase 1
friend funding

Figure 2.
Typical path of consumer
investment via
a crowd-funding platform
Time
JOSM The project creator has to assume a great deal of responsibility in this stage. As the
22,4 Kapipal founder observed:
It depends on the Kapipalist’s skills; in other words project creators are the ones that have to
begin to post on Facebook, on Twitter and on other social networks in order to gain visibility
[. . .] and determine a donation peak.

458 This is the most delicate phase because, as our informant noted, many projects never
leave this stage and the primary reason for the failure of crowd-funding projects is the
inability to trigger the crowding process. Moreover, according to a SellaBand manager,
there is a vicious cycle that sets in as time goes by, because “a project that shows a long
stagnation in the accumulated investment looks less attractive in the eyes of potential
contributors,” due to their inferring that investing in the project will be very risky.
Only for a few projects is there the so-called “engagement moment,” which triggers a
chain reaction and facilitates rapid growth toward the investment target. According to
SellaBand’s founder, “artists who pass beyond $25,000 usually get pretty fast to $50,000”
(assuming that $50,000 the investment target). The investors in this last phase are
usually “people who did not have any original connection to the initiative, but they just
start talking to us because they read about the crowd-funding process and got
interested,” according to one of our Trampoline interviewees. After the engagement
moment, a “race to be in” stage begins, and people speed up their investment decisions
because, once the target is reached, the opportunity to invest will no longer exist. As one
SellaBand manager told us, “when people realize that ‘ok, these artists will get to their
goal pretty fast,’ the flow of investment dramatically increases because no one wants to
be excluded”[1]. While less important, this phase is also present in the case of Kapipal,
because “when you see that a charity project on which you are particularly interested in
is close to reaching the target for being funded, there is an extra incentive to participate
in order to not miss the opportunity to be part of it,” as one executive told us.

The crowd-funding firm

Purposes. Turning to our findings relating to the perspective of the firm that organizes
the crowd-funding initiative, the key informants in all three cases shared the broad
view that crowd-funding is a way to engage consumers in social networks and virtual
communities, and to stimulate their financial participation in projects proposed by
someone else. However, as might be expected, the specific crowd-funding objectives
mentioned by our interviewees differed across the three cases.
Kapipal is “a service to easily collect money from individuals through the internet in
order to fund social projects.” It was created because the founder felt “the absence of a
simple tool which could give the opportunity to everybody to use crowd-funding in
personal life.” The purpose of Kapipal is thus to set up a method to fund social
initiatives online.
SellaBand’s purpose is instead to “empower artists and fans in a global
community”; this initiative is positioned as a service that provides an alternative to the
traditional music industry by enabling artists to execute promising music projects with
support and financial assistance from their fans. As stated in SellaBand’s web site:
[. . .] the idea of SellaBand came from a love for music and the frustration of hearing the same
artists always on the radio, while so many talented artists remain unnoticed by the traditional
music industry.
As for Trampoline, its aim was described as follows by one executive: “(we) look at Transforming
alternative ways to raise financing for the business [by] directly involving people.” customers into
According to another Trampoline manager, the firm:
investors
[. . .] has pioneered an unconventional approach to finance its growth. Instead of raising
money from venture capital firms we use crowd-funding, raising smaller stakes from a
community of smart private investors.
459
Thus, the overall purpose of this firm is to raise alternative venture capital, in the form
of direct investments of relatively smaller sums by a group of interested people,
in contrast to traditional funding models that rely on large commitments from a
relatively small number of institutions.
Service roles. Paralleling the differences in purpose and delivered content across
the three investigated crowd-funding initiatives, our findings reveal the presence of
fundamental differences in the roles played by the corresponding service firms.
SellaBand’s role is that of a relational mediator. As one SellaBand manager told us,
“we essentially offer a bridge between supply and demand of music.” New artists typically
face significant hurdles in approaching regular recording companies because their only
option is to deal with a few big “majors” that are difficult to contact and negotiate with in
trying to get a contract. Moreover, given the high risk associated with producing and
promoting a brand new artist, such contracts are hard to get and often do not favor the
artists. At the same time, since most of the music available in the marketplace is limited to
that selected by the big recording companies, “fans are treated as passive users with
no role in deciding which music should be delivered,” as one SellaBand interviewee put it.
SellaBand thus acts as an intermediary (between music supply and demand), with the
primary role of linking new artists with committed music lovers who believe in the artists
strongly enough to provide them with monetary support. According to a SellaBand
manager, “This will give them (music lovers) both monetary and emotional rewards and
should increase the number of new and successful artists launched in the market.”
The founder of Kapipal described a similar role to that of SellaBand, but with some
differences. Kapipal acts as an intermediary that “helps people to collect money for
personal reasons.” However, its crowd-funding platform is not industry-specific and
does not facilitate any business purpose. Instead it is a service that supports a variety
of individual purposes, ranging from charity to social initiatives to personal projects.
Kapipal serves as a consumer-to-consumer financial platform that is highly flexible
from the Kapipalist’s perspective. In effect, Kapipal acts as a social gatekeeper. As one
Kapipal manager stated:
[. . .] we assist people who need to collect money by exploiting their social network
connections; the Kapipalist decides who to invite among friends, parents, etc. involved
in her/his social networks, and if some rewards are expected for participation. Then,
the amount of money gathered from these people (and those in turn invited by them) within a
certain time limit is available to the Kapipalist for her/his initiative.
The interviews with Trampoline reveal a third role, not based on intermediation
but on the strong inclusion of investors. The main difference with SellaBand and
Kapipal is that the crowd-funding platform in Trampoline’s case is not a separate
entity, but is organized by the supplier itself to fund its proposed initiative, and thus
acts as an engine of growth for the initiative. A Trampoline informant stated: “There is
no intermediation [between supply and demand] in Trampoline, but crowd-funding
JOSM is used to seek for potential entrepreneurs on a specific and unique innovative project.”
22,4 While the SellaBand platform acts as a distribution channel, and Kapipal leverages the
potential of social networks, Trampoline directly proposes the project to be crowd
funded, and acts in order to facilitate its realization.
Network effects. Our analysis reveals that crowd-funding models can significantly
affect value networks, by modifying the intermediation functions played by service
460 organizations involved in those networks. The financial involvement of consumers in
SellaBand and Trampoline affects traditional intermediaries in the market; namely,
recording companies and private-equity firms, respectively. In the case of SellaBand,
the crowd-funding firm itself acts as a new kind of intermediary, and becomes a substitute
for the conventional intermediary (i.e. recording company). SellaBand aims to create
“an alternative to the traditional music industry, [. . .] [a] new distribution channel where
consumers are responsible for the selection of the offering and the related investment.”
In contrast, the crowd-funding mechanism in Trampoline helps supply and demand
to disintermediate the venture capital market, rather than merely substituting the
traditional intermediaries. According to Trampoline’s web site, the crowd-funding
model:
[. . .] is not going to replace venture capital, private equity, debt finance or stock-markets.
These traditional models will continue to provide the most efficient solution for certain
financing needs; [. . .] [but crowd-funding] could establish itself as the best solution for many
early and mid-stage ventures.
Moreover, Trampoline’s founder suggested that new technology makes the entire
crowd-funding process more transparent. Information about the flow of funds from
current consumer-investors is readily available to anyone, for each project and at any
time, thereby facilitating the decisions of other interested individuals regarding
whether to join the crowd.
In the case of Kapipal, the crowd-funding platform acts as a new intermediary that
“should integrate existing networks and improve the traditional personal connections.”
In other words, a previously-absent intermediary function is added. According to
Kapipal’s founder, while collecting donations from groups of individuals has a long
history in the domain of fund-raising for charity, the advent of Web 2.0 made it
possible for crowd-funding “to live a second life” because it “connects people in a better
way, enhancing contacts, knowledge and word-of-mouth.” According to the Kapipalist
Manifesto, published on Kapipal’s web site, social-network friends and contacts are
fundamental for raising capital and extending the benefit from participation.

Discussion and implications

Limitations
What can these findings about crowd-funding phenomena add to existing literature?
Before discussing our analysis and proposing some considerations and contributions
about the new role of consumers as investors and the evolution of crowd-funding service
models, we want to note the limitations of our analysis. First, all findings should be
viewed in the light of the qualitative and exploratory nature of our inquiry.
Although we provide a clear rationale for sample selection, and took great care in
adhering to well-established procedures during data collection and triangulation,
we can only offer an inductive discussion of and preliminary insights about
the crowd-funding phenomenon. Future research could extend these insights in a Transforming
quantitative fashion, e.g. by investigating the drivers of success of crowd-funding customers into
initiatives. For instance, using one crowd-funding platform as a study context,
researchers could analyze and compare funded vs non-funded initiatives so as to identify investors
factors that distinguish between the two types.
Second, our research design did not include the collection of data directly from
consumers involved in crowd-funding. Instead we only have the perspectives of 461
managers of service firms organizing crowd-funding initiatives. While investigation of
the phenomenon from a consumer perspective is beyond this paper’s scope, this
limitation should be taken into account in considering the implications of our findings.
There is a need and opportunity for future research to focus on the consumer side and
investigate the personal or contextual traits that make one individual more or less
likely to become a participant in crowd-funding initiatives.
Despite these limitations, however, we believe our analysis offers some interesting
insights for beginning to build a knowledge base about the nascent phenomenon of
consumers acting as investors, and the evolution of innovative service models related
to this phenomenon.

Theoretical contributions: consumer’s role

Findings from our analysis of crowd-funding offer some new insights to the service
literature pertaining to the role played by consumers in the service process. First,
the motivations for consumer participation in crowd-funding initiatives, and the
participants’ key characteristics of participants, contribute to the recent coproduction
literature calling for more research on understanding the consumers’ active engagement
in the service provision (Etgar, 2008). A feeling of being at least partly responsible for the
success of others’ initiatives (desire for patronage), striving to be part of a communal
social initiative (desire for social participation), and seeking a payoff from monetary
contributions (desire for investment) extend the set of motivations for consumer
collaboration discussed the extant literature, such as differentiation (Song and Adams,
1993), customization (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Wind and Rangaswamy, 2001), saving
(Sheth et al., 1999), experience (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004), and self-expression
(von Hippel, 1986; Holt, 1995). Moreover, while the current literature on coproduction
focuses the drivers of individual consumers’ participation in a service activity, our
analysis highlights the need and the potential for generating new insights by focusing
on how consumers participate and interact in collective contexts such as crowd-funding
initiatives, where the service outcome depends on group, rather than individual,
participation.
In addition, while the current coproduction literature indentifies information,
knowledge, and labor as the primary resources that consumers can use when
coproducing a service offering (Lengnick-Hall, 1996; Fang, 2008), our analysis reveals
that in collective contexts such as crowd-funding, consumers’ monetary funds and
project-screening capabilities represent important additional resources that trigger the
service process and determine the extent of consumer participation. Furthermore, our
findings reveal several distinct traits of consumers who are likely to participate in
crowd-funding-like initiatives: innovative orientation, which stimulates the desire
to try new modes of interacting with firms and other consumers; social identification
with the content, cause or project selected for funding, which sparks the desire
JOSM to be a part of the initiative; and (monetary) exploitation, which motivates consumers
22,4 to participate by expecting a payoff from their monetary support for the
initiative. These traits may co-exist in consumers, although the relative importance of
each in motivating participating are likely to vary across consumers and types of
crowd-funding initiatives.
Another contribution from our analysis is to the burgeoning literature on SDL
462 (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008). Specifically, our findings demonstrate and give concrete
meaning to two of SDL’s fundamental propositions: “all actors are resource integrators”
(FP9); and “the customer is always a co-creator of value” (FP6). Crowd-funding
participants’ roles and activities uncovered in our study suggest that in crowd-funding
contexts consumers are the key players in:
.
activating the process; and
.
the influencing the ultimate value of the offerings or outcomes of the process.

These roles and activities lend credence to theoretical arguments claiming that the
separation between production and consumption activities is becoming increasingly
blurred (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Xie et al., 2008), and that what consumers do is
much more important than what they purchase (Xie et al., 2008). Crowd-funding
participants do indeed engage in a variety of tasks: they act as agents of the offering,
selecting, and promoting the projects in which they believe (as in the case of
SellaBand); sometimes they play a donor role oriented towards providing help on social
projects (e.g. Kapipal); in some cases, consumers in effect become shareholders,
contributing to the development and growth of the offering (e.g. Trampoline).
With varying emphases depending on the type of crowd-funding initiative,
consumers screen and evaluate potential projects, then choose the ones to support
financially, and finally disseminate information about them in online communities to
generate further support for the projects. Consumers thus become integrators of talent
(of others), financial resources (their own), and promotional efforts (through social
networks) in their role as crowd-funding participants. Without their participation no
value can be created in the initiative – either for the suppliers (they cannot see their
projects/causes reaching fruition), or for other (non-participating) consumers (they cannot
find the product or service that was not crowd-funded), or for the firm organizing the
crowd-funding initiative (it cannot realize revenues from the initiative). In this sense,
crowd-funding initiatives constitute one of the first concrete applications and extensions
of SDL’s foundational principles pertaining to consumers’ roles as co-creators of value.

Theoretical contributions: service firm’s role

Findings from our investigation also offer some additional theoretical insights from the
perspective of service firms that set up and manage crowd-funding initiatives, First, our
findings once again demonstrate and extend two key foundational principles of the SDL
(Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008) that relate to the role of service organizations: “all actors
are resource integrators” (FP9); and “the enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer
value propositions” (FP7). Our analysis shows that in some crowd-funding initiatives,
resource integration happens because the service firm acts as a relational mediator,
linking the supply of creative projects with a crowd of individuals who may decide to
invest in them, and with the marketplace at large that generates the final demand for the
crowd-funding initiative’s offerings (as in the case of SellaBand). In some other cases,
the integration process is similar but occurs in a customer-to-customer context, where Transforming
the service firm acts as a social gatekeeper, matching social or personal projects with customers into
potential donors (e.g. Kapipal). In the case of venture-capital initiatives (e.g. Trampoline),
the resource-integration process is quite different. In such initiatives the crowd-funding investors
firm does not have an intermediary role (i.e. external to that of suppliers and consumers);
instead it represents an “internal” service, an engine of growth for entrepreneurs/innovators
who aim to integrate financial resources and expertise from other interested investors. 463
In all cases, our analysis reveals that the service firms set up important “pre-conditions”
(Edvardsson and Olsson, 1996) – technological, organizational, and relational – to allow
crowds of interested consumers to participate in the crowd-funding initiative. In other
words, the firms’ resource-integration role takes the form of creating an infrastructure
to facilitates interactions among the other value co-creators – namely, the crowds of people
who participate, and the subjects who propose projects or causes to be funded.
Our findings also contribute to the literature on networks (Achrol and Kotler, 1999;
Parkhe et al., 2006) by extending the theoretical streams that deal with the organization
of value-chain activities through dispersed networks. Firms that organize
crowd-funding initiatives serve as a typical “network orchestrator,” in that they do
not execute specific activities, but create the necessary organizational systems and
conditions for resource integration among other players to take place. However, our
findings extend this perspective, in that crowd-funding firms orchestrate a unique type
of network, in which the key activator is a group of consumer-investors and not the
organization. Our findings also suggest that service firms in crowd-funding contexts
have different orchestration options. The firm (i.e. orchestrator) can either add an
intermediary role that was previously absent (as in the case of Kapipal and its
consumer-to-consumer funding), or substitute a traditional intermediary (e.g. SellaBand
taking the place of traditional recording companies), or disintermediate by eliminating
the activity of a service provider previously involved in the network (e.g. Trampoline’s
approach avoids the use of traditional venture-capital services). Crowd-funding is
thus a phenomenon that has the potential to significantly alter the roles of service
organizations in value networks.

Conclusions
This paper develops a qualitative analysis of the emerging crowd-funding phenomenon,
for the purpose of understanding the (new) role of consumers as investors in these
crowd-funding models, and discusses the implications of crowd-funding for service
organizations. The inductive investigation of three cases of crowd-funding facilitates a
clearer, more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon. Findings from the
investigation contribute some novel concepts and theoretical frameworks to the service
literature that can guide both managerial practice and future research pertaining to
crowd-funding.
Keeping in mind the limitations that characterize qualitative and exploratory
inquiries, we wish to conclude this paper by coming back to where we started:
the evolution and progressive accumulation of different roles by consumers as portrayed
in the literature.
As Figure 3 shows, over time, different theoretical perspectives have portrayed
consumers as “targets,” “information sources,” “co-producers,” and “value co-creators.”
Our investigation of the crowd-funding reveals a new potential role for consumers –
JOSM
22,4

?
Service
464 dominant
• Target
Service • information
logic source
marketing; • target
open • co-producer
Market • information • valueco-creator
innovation source
orientation • target • investor?
• target • co-producer
• information • valueco-creator
• information source
Functional source
school • co-producer
Figure 3. (4P’s)
The accumulation of roles • target
played by consumers 1990 2005
in marketing literature
Note: The emerging role of consumers as investors

namely, as investors – that extant literature has not yet fully captured or discussed.
Our research takes a first small step in this direction.

Note
1. Given SellaBand’s revenue model, which links investor payoff to the sales realized by funded
projects, in this case there is another stage of the process that starts after the investment
phase has been completed. This phase directly involves the investors, who are called on to
promote the project they funded in order to gain larger revenues.

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JOSM Appendix. The interview protocol
22,4 (1) (SellaBand and Kapipal) In your opinion, which are the success factors of
SellaBand/Kapipal? On the other side, do you think are there some elements to be
improved?
(2) What are the aims?
.
(SellaBand and Kapipal) In a few words, can you describe the philosophy and mission
468 of SellaBand/Kapipal?
.
(Trampoline) Why did Trampoline Systems decide to adopt the crowdfunding
business model?
(3) (Trampoline and Kapipal) How does your crowdfunding process work?
(4) (Trampoline) In literature (and also in your web site), crowdfunding is described as the
collection of money through small donations from ordinary people. However,
Trampoline seems to dissociate itself from this definition, because you ask for a huge
amount of money and you select the investors. In your opinion, is Trampoline’s
crowdfunding model a different type of crowdfunding?
(5) From our point of view, crowdfunding web sites seem to act as “orchestrators”, in other
words firms that are focused on the network and work like guest conductors in an
orchestra, coordinating a highly skilled set of independent musicians:
.
(SellaBand and Kapipal) Do you think your firm acts as a pure network orchestrator?
Is your role only the coordination of artists/kapipalist and believers/contributors?
.
(Trampoline) In our opinion, this definition is appropriate for Trampoline. Do you
agree with us? How can you define your role?
(6) Can you describe your product/project?
.
(SellaBand) Why is music suitable for the crowdfunding business model?
.
(SellaBand) Do you think this business model can be successfully applied to other
type of products?
(7) (Kapipal) What are the main types of project created (charity, gifts, etc. . .)? Analyzing
the different possible features, we noted that fundraising can be public or private. Why
does a Kapipalist decide to create a private fund?
(8) (SellaBand and Kapipal) Do you have some criteria for the initial screening of the
projects?
(9) In the crowdfunding model, the economic risk is taken by investors:
.
(SellaBand and Trampoline) Does SellaBand/Trampoline take a risk too? If so, how?
.
(Kapipal) What is the profit for Kapipal?
(10) In the light of all these considerations, what might be the future development of the
crowdfunding phenomenon?
(11) Can you describe the main features of the typical investor?
. (SellaBand) From your point of view, what are the differences between a
believer/supporter and a music/fashion lover?
.
(Trampoline) Are they firms or individual investors?
(12) (Trampoline) Why did Trampoline decide to establish standards (FSA qualifications) for
the investors?
(13) Do you think your actual investor have a high innovative orientation in their behavior
(lead user)?
(14) (SellaBand and Kapipal) If yes, in your opinion, does SellaBand/Kapipal risk becoming a Transforming
niche phenomenon? Do you think that in the future crowdfunding web sites will be
supported by other kinds of consumers? customers into
(15) Why does an investor decide to put money in a web site as (web site name)? investors
.
(SellaBand) There are many web sites where new artists upload their songs, and
where a consumer can choose and rapidly receive the products selected. In your
opinion, why does a consumer prefer SellaBand, where he has to wait for product 469
production before receiving it?
.
(Kapipal) In your opinion, why does a consumer decide to put money in a web site
such as Kapipal? Why does he participate in these charity or personal projects?
.
(Trampoline) Why does an investor decide to put money in your innovative project,
instead of simply make a traditional investment?
(16) What are the main motivations of the investment?
.
(SellaBand and Trampoline) Do you think the economic return is the main determinant
of the investment? If there are any, what are the other psychological motivations?
.
(SellaBand) On your web site, the consumer actively participates by putting money in
in order to sustain artists. However, there are many other web sites where the
consumer has an active role, without funding, but voting on artists and then
contributing to their success. Why is a consumer interested in funding artists, instead
of simply supporting them by voting?
.
(Trampoline) What are the differences between crowdfunding and traditional
investments?
.
(SellaBand) Although little risk is taken on average, is it appropriate to consider the
believer an “entrepreneur”, in other words like someone who assumes accountability
for the risks and the outcome of a venture?
(17) (Trampoline and Kapipal) Can investors/contributors make suggestions or
improvements to the project funded?
(18) (SellaBand and Kapipal) In your opinion, how does a potential believer/contributor select
the project to fund among the wide choice of available projects?
(19) (Trampoline and Kapipal) Are there some protections or guarantees for the
investors/contributors?
(20) With the advent of Web 2.0, consumers have become more active, and some phenomena,
such as crowdsourcing or crowdfunding, have spread. According to you, could
crowdfunding exist without Web 2.0? If so, how could it be possible?
(21) Analyzing the crowdfunding phenomenon, we noted there are strong connections
between crowdfunding web sites and social networks. What is their role in
(web site name)?
(22) (Trampoline) If none, how does Trampoline create the investor network?
(23) Can you describe the investment flow? Are there stages/phases? Are there moments of
stagnation or speeding up?
(24) Are different consumers involved depending on the stage of the investment flow? Who
are the consumers who invest in the first phase/at the beginning? And in the last phase?
(25) What is the average investment? The minimum share or more?
(26) (SellaBand and Kapipal) Does a consumer usually invest in one project or more? What is
the average number of projects funded by a consumer?
JOSM (27) Achieving the target?
22,4 .
(SellaBand) Considering the artists who have reached their target, did you note
similar features among them? (if there are similar features) Why do you think
believers prefer to fund this kind of artist?
.
(Trampoline) When do you expect to achieve the target?
.
(Kapipal) How many fundraisings reached the target?
470
Corresponding author
Andrea Ordanini can be contacted at: [email protected]

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