Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years, crowdfunding has been rising as a relevant solution to finance innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives (e.g., Belleflamme et al., 2014; Mollick, 2014). Projects currently financed through crowdfunding aim at producing different outputs e.g. innovative electrical appliances, movies, videogames, and music shows. Along with these typically commercial projects, which have been broadly investigated in extant literature, crowdfunding is more and more adopted to finance projects with a clear social impact. In particular, public entities have been increasingly relying on crowdfunding to finance their social project (Brent and Lorah, 2019). These crowdfunding initiatives are commonly labeled as civic crowdfunding in the popular press. However, despite the recent growth of this phenomenon and its high potential impact, the literature on this form of crowdfunding is still in its early development phase (Brent and Lorah, 2019).
This project aims at increasing our understanding of this phenomenon. In particular, we plan to develop a database of European Civic Crowdfunding campaigns. The database developed will be used to study the diffusion of civic crowdfunding in Europe, provide a taxonomy of civic crowdfunding campaigns, assess whether the propensity to use civic crowdfunding by public entities varies in different institutional settings, and determine the funding dynamics of civic crowdfunding campaigns.

Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T. and Schwienbacher, A. (2014), Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd, Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 585-609.
Brent, D.A. and Lorah, K. (2019), The economic geography of civic crowdfunding, Cities, Vol. 90, July, pp. 122-130.
Mollick, E. (2014), The dynamics of crowdfunding: an exploratory study, Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 1¿16.