The Relevance of Crowdfunding: The Impact on the Innovation Process of Small Entrepreneurial Firms

Nadine Scholz shows that crowdfunding potentially shortens the development cycle of new products, thus enabling an earlier market entry. Hence, crowdfunding serves as a multifaceted early-stage support instrument for innovation implementation facilitated by the crowd's resources. It not only provides upfront cash for product development and production, more importantly it enables a firm to show traction through the validation of the market demand that is based on the crowd's function as information multiplicator generating public exposure and feedback.