Does the Crowd Support Innovation? Innovation Claims and Success on Kickstarter

Cathy L. Yang (), Anirban Mukherjee (), Ping Xiao () and Amitava Chattopadhyay ()

No 1220, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: Online crowdfunding is a popular new tool for raising capital to commercialize product innovation. Product innovation must be both novel and useful (1-4). Therefore, we study the role of novelty and usefulness claims on Kickstarter. Startlingly, we find that a single claim of novelty increases project funding by about 200%, a single claim of usefulness increases project funding by about 1200%, and the co-occurrence of novelty and usefulness claims lowers funding by about 26%. Our findings are encouraging because they suggest the crowd strongly supports novelty and usefulness. However, our findings are disappointing because the premise of crowdfunding is to support projects that are innovative, i.e. that are both novel and useful, rather than projects that are only novel or only useful.

Keywords: Crowdfunding; Entrepreneurship; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 M13 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2017-07-01, Revised 2017-09-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-pay, nep-ppm and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3003283 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1220

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().