The recent emergence of online crowdfunding campaigns has transformed the charitable landscape in China. This paper examines the participation of one county-level grassroots nonprofit organization (SW) in Tencent's 99 Giving Day to reveal a paradox of organizational success in online crowdfunding, namely that local nonprofits have to wage corresponding offline campaigns with the support of the local government, and thus must co-evolve with local politics. While the online charitable campaign played a crucial role in the founding and professionalization of SW, the successful campaign was soon co-opted by the local government as a source of welfare soft-budgeting and performance management. To ensure the ongoing success of the three-day campaign, the online crowdfunding was transformed into a large-scale offline mobilization. We find that although crowdfunding creates new opportunities for rural grassroots organizations, these organizations must balance dual pressures from both the platform and the local government to successfully crowdfund online.

This article examines different ways in which finance models have become the ruling mode of spatializing relationships, arguing that the ongoing convergence of economic and spatial investment has transformed our environments into heavily contested ‘financescapes’. First, it reflects upon architecture's capacity to give both material and symbolic form to these processes and considers the impacts this has on the emergence of novel kinds of urban investment frontiers, including luxury brand real estate, free zones, private cities, and urban innovation hubs. Focusing on speculative urban developments in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, the article then highlights the performative dimension of such building programs: how architectural capital is put to work by actively performing the frontiers of future development. Physically staking out future financial gains, this mode of operation is today becoming increasingly manifested in urban crowdfunding schemes. We argue that, far from promoting new models of civic participation, such schemes are functioning as a testbed for speculation around new patterns of spatial production in which architecture acts less as the flagstaff of capital than as a capital system in itself.

Crowdfunding is becoming increasingly popular for funding projects, particularly in the domain of product design, by asking a large group of people. Previous studies have indicated that creativity plays a significant role in product design and is considered an important factor of success for new product design and development. However, these studies have not explicitly explored the role of creativity in crowdfunding product design projects. This paper investigates this issue by conducting a case study employing expert evaluations of selected successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding product design project samples. The results of the study show there is a positive relationship between the creativity of a product and the success of its crowdfunding campaign. Therefore, creativity can be considered a success factor of crowdfunding. The study also suggests creative products, especially useful ones, might have more potential to attract people's willingness to fund them. This paper has contributed to the research on design, creativity, product design and development, and funding business models. Most importantly, this paper has raised the significance of creativity in design and business.

This paper purports to study the enormous proliferation of fintech online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in Indonesia, along with their risks and the prevailing regulations of fintech online P2P lending. This article also suggests a varied spectrum of regulatory actions for regulating online P2P lending as an approach to increase consumer protection and stimulate the growth of Indonesia’s financial inclusion. It highlights the regulative risks and challenges of fintech online P2P lending in Indonesia and has discovered various spectra of regulatory responses that the Indonesian government can practise to regulate this potential industry. Solid recommendations were also given to regulators to better develop the present regulatory framework. This paper adds to the literature on the prevailing practice of online P2P lending by offering a legal outlook involving legal protection and the newly emerging fintech industry from an Indonesian context.

Crowdfunding is the process of taking a project in need of investment and asking a large group of people to supply the investment. It allows organisations to sell their product before production, reducing the risk of new product development. Organisations such as Tesla and General Electric have used crowdfunding successfully but crowdfunding is yet to be explored as part of a formalised product development framework. This paper includes the business case for commercialising new products with crowdfunding and presents crowdfunding as part of a product development and commercialisation framework.

This paper provides an empirical review of the reward-based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com, with the aim to explore and identify challenges in crowdfunded product development, which consequently can lead to failure of the crowdfunding campaign. The review was based on the analysis of a total of 144 successfully funded ‘technology’ campaigns, which all concerned the creation of physical consumer hardware preordered by campaign backers. The analysis was built around a failure mode model, which was established through a pre-study. The study reveals that (i) no more than 32% of the campaigns managed to deliver the crowdfunded products on time, and, if campaigns are delayed, (ii) there is a significantly higher probability that the delivered products might lack expected attributes. The causes for delay have many reasons, but (iii) a set of particular product development issues were identified as the main challenges. A better understanding of crowdfunded product development can help researchers and practitioners to better understand and utilize the opportunities of this new product development paradigm.

Crowdfunding has recently emerged as a novel way of financing new ventures. It coincides with a growing interest in wine as an investment good and with a search for new funding opportunities by wine makers. In this study, we examine potential investors willing to engage in wine crowdfunded projects and the kind of revenue that would attract them. We presented an original survey where respondents were asked about their wine consumption and purchase, their knowledge about crowdfunding, their relation to the internet, their investment and project related to wine crowdfunding, and their expectations concerning the returns from this type of contribution. Our results suggest that among all forms of crowdfunding, the donation/voluntary contribution side driven by intrinsic motivation is likely to remain marginal compared to crowdfunding as an investment or a form of early purchase. (JEL Classifications: G11, G12, G21, L17, L66)

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium. First, the financial support for deliberative democracy mainly comes from the more socially advantaged groups. But second, the crowdfunders largely diverge in their democratic preferences. Some are critical and favour any forms of alternative decision-making process, including technocratic forms. Others demonstrate a stronger attachment to electoral institutions and their political actors. Hence, the study of the crowdfunders of the G1000 shows that deliberative democracy attracts the support of citizens with different political orientations. This sheds light on the complex and intertwined links between a mini-public and its larger maxi-public.