Reward-based Crowdfunding: Where are we at?

The quest for ‘democratizing’ the commercialization of innovations (Mollick and Robb, 2016), providing opportunities to entrepreneurs otherwise excluded from traditional forms of finance and together contributing to economic growth (Fleming and Sorenson, 2016) renders crowdfunding a managerially and socially relevant phenomenon. Crowdfunding refers to “the practice of soliciting financial contributions from a large number of people, generally via online community” (Soublière and Gheman, 2020: 473). In the last decades, studies have been flourishing around the topic, especially focusing on equity crowdfunding (Chung et al., 2021; Gleasure and Feller, 2016; Mollick, 2014; Mollick and Robb, 2016; Short et al., 2017). More recently, research (e.g., Giudici et al. 2018; Mollick, 2014; Dos Santos Felipe et al. 2022; Sewaid et al., 2021) has started to disentangle the main characteristics and mechanisms related to a different form of crowdfunding, i.e. reward crowdfunding, through which the backers of the projects receive a non-financial reward (e.g., credits, pre-selling product options, etc.) for their funding. The peculiarities of this form of external financing and the rapid increase in the number of studies focusing on reward crowdfunding over the last years (in 2021, our research on Scopus points to a 74% increase from the previous year), call for a systematic review of the literature to provide a clear picture of the state of the art around this phenomenon.