The Strategic Entrepreneurship Pitching on Crowdfunding Platforms: A Traction Toward Emerging Advanced Technologies

The emerging technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G, internet-of-things (IoT), and other technological advancements are drastically shaping different industries, including entrepreneurs and their businesses, as well as the investors of entrepreneurial firms. Consequently, a growing number of entrepreneurs have incorporated these technological advancements (henceforth called advanced technologies) in their start-up ventures seeking investment from crowdfunding platforms. Due to the complex and emerging nature of these advanced technologies, little is known about whether involving these latest technology transformations in a crowdfunding project could create a strategic advantage over other projects in their conversations about funding acquisition with the general public.

Through the empirical analyses of project descriptions and success rate from the data of two leading crowdfunding platforms, we analyzed the strategic importance of highlighting a single or multiple trendy topics on the funding outcomes—both the amount of funding pledged and the additional dollars pledged to a project. Our results suggest that crowdfunding projects featuring a trendy technology transformation are likely to achieve more funding, thus a better success rate of the project proposal, compared to the non-trendy projects. This relationship appears to be highly significant on Kickstarter and marginally significant on Indiegogo. Such findings expand the current theoretical understanding on technological crowdfunding and provide strategic implications for the entrepreneurs in term of the composition of their fundraising conversations.