Motivations for crowdfunding: What Drives the Crowd to Invest in Start-UPS?

Equity-based crowdfunding is an increasingly popular source to fund start-ups. In equity-based crowdfunding, a form of crowdsourcing, many crowdfundees collectively fund a start-up by providing parts of the requested funding in prospect of financial returns. While extant research has provided insights into the crowd’s motives for participating in various forms of crowdsourcing initiatives, we know little about the motivations that drive the crowd to invest in start-ups via crowdfunding. In literature, there are ongoing calls to investigate this phenomenon since it is expected that motives for investing in start-ups via crowdfunding differ from motives for engaging in other forms of crowdsourcing initiatives. Against this background, this research aims at investigating why crowdfundees fund start-ups. In this research-in-progress paper we build on related literature to theoretically develop a research model and plan to validate this model with an empirical survey on an equity-based crowdfunding platform specialised on start-up funding. By giving concrete answers to this research questions, our research will take up on a deeper understanding of the crowd’s motivation for investing in start-ups and therefore theoretically contributes to the understanding of the body of knowledge in motivations in crowdsourcing.