Crowdfunding as a way of the monetary and financial ecologies

Abstract

This paper deals with crowdfunding as a new innovative form of financing projects that implement innovations focusing on a modern, up-to-date phenomenon in the field of innovation projects. Literary sources and approaches systematization for solving crowdfunding issues indicates that crowdfunding could be understood as a new, popular and innovative way of financing innovative projects around the world. It spread in developed countries in 2008 in response to the financial crisis. Besides, the rapid expansion of the Internet and mobile Internet access provoked its expansion in developing countries. The authors described crowdfunding as a current way of financing representing an individual form of innovative projects financing. Investigation of crowdfunding is based on cluster analysis of variables such as the funds' amount collected by crowdfunding, the number of crowdfunding contributors and the average amount of contributions of individual contributors to crowdfunding. The research objects are EU-28 countries. The output of the process of object distances clustering was displayed in the form of a dendrogram. It demonstrated the graphical grouping of related objects into clusters. The interpretation of the whole analysis and its further application depends on choosing the right number level of resulting clusters. The cluster analysis findings identified four clusters of objects set on several relatively homogeneous subsets of clusters. Objects belonging to the same cluster were similar, while objects originating from different clusters - dissimilar. The authors noted that despite the innovativeness and trendiness of crowdfunding, the analysis results point to its diverse position in the EU countries. Besides, it was confirmed by the results of the applied analysis. Presented clusters point to the different number of contributors and the average value of funds spent on innovation through crowdfunding at various average contributions from one contributor. Therefore, the countries successfully applying this innovative way of innovative projects financing were the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and EU countries that realized this way of financing to a lesser extent.