Crowdfunding Campaigns and Success: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Crowdfunding is one of the well-known fintech innovations providing opportunity to creative people (project initiators) to collect money from others (backers) for making their ideas come true. The interaction of the backers and initiators takes place on a web-based platform through a crowdfunding campaign launched for a limited time to achieve a predetermined monetary goal. The aim of the authors is to create an overview of the academic literature dealing with the success factors of crowdfunding campaigns to set an agenda for future research. The authors reviewed 22 high quality empirical articles written in English, gathered from 5 relevant databases and ranked Q1 by Scimago to provide a systematic literature review. The results and conclusions of the selected articles were analyzed using qualitative content analysis to create the conceptual framework for the successful crowdfunding campaigns. The authors found 60 success factors analyzed by top researchers grouped in 17 categories and 4 themes which can be influenced by the campaign initiators. This paper provides a typology of factors contributing to the success of crowdfunding campaigns which can be used as a framework for further research by scientists and as an executive summary of key influence areas by business practitioners.