Co-Creation of Value in Relationships Crowdfunding-Territory: An Exploratory Study in the Italian Context

Crowdfunding (CF) has seen an accelerated growth as a tool for entrepreneurs to raise funds from the crowd for the development of their innovative projects. According to Massolution report, the global CF industry reached $34.4 billion in 2015. Crowdfunding involves the consumer in financially way and by doing so maximizes the involvement of consumers in the process of value co-creation. The literature confirms that the crowd participate in fundraising for reasons beyond the benefits they may accrue as individuals, therefore crowdfunding platforms can be seen as an authentic expression of community. So promoting active citizenship, strengthening of communities and meeting public need in service delivery, crowdfunding creates an opportunity to convert social capital into economic and/or political capital. Most of the literature investigate critical factors positively correlated to the success in crowdfunding as: the participation of the entrepreneurs' friends and family in fundraising, signals of quality, project duration etc. Surprisingly, few scholars analysed the importance of territory and relationship between territory and crowdfunding. Thus, the research question of this study is: can the territorial capital influence the co creation of value by crowdfunding? An exploratory research is performed in order to answer to such question. The empirical analysis is conducted on Produzioni dal Basso platform, which it is one of the first CF platforms born in Europe. We took into consideration projects over a time period 2011-2014. The results demonstrate a relationship between co creation of value through crowdfunding and some variables of territorial capital. The originality of our analysis is the exploration of the geographically bound determinants of successful crowdfunding in opposing to the major works of academic literature.