How social and sustainable entrepreneurial ideas enrich the world – Studying the evolution of entrepreneurial ideas in crowdfunding campaigns across time and space

One of the many intriguing features of new venture ideas for academic inquiry is that they are “imaginary combinations of product/service offerings, potential markets or users, and means of bringing these offerings into existence” (Davidsson, 2015: 675). Consequently, entrepreneurs typically lack evidence – for example, in the form of a protype or a financial track record – that their new venture ideas are viable. Consequently, they seek to interact with customers, financiers, external resource providers or other types of potential supporters to convince them of the merit of their idea. Crowdfunding, the empirical focus of this paper, provides a privileged vantage point for analyzing how entrepreneurs showcase and test the market potential and has developed into a disperse marketplace (Belleflamme, Lambert & Schwienbacher, 2014). Potential backers are the first potential customers an entrepreneur might have, and crowdfunding trends might oftentimes foreshadow demand in new markets and product offerings. As such, they might also reflect broader societal trends, in particular as it pertains to social and sustainable entrepreneurship. As a case in point, crowdfunding has been predictive of investments by capital providers (Thies, Huber, Bock, Benlian and Kraus, 2019; Kaminski, Hopp, and Tykvova, 2019), whose investment decisions are based on a mix of financial, community, and social considerations.