Crowdfunding: A Theory-Centered Review and Roadmap of the Multidisciplinary Literature

Abstract

Crowdfunding is a relatively nascent, rapidly growing phenomenon whereby individuals or ventures pursue funding from a potentially large number of backers via the Internet. This rapidly emerging literature invites a variety of conceptual lenses and offers significant potential to advance theoretical understanding of important organizational activities, such as how entrepreneurs and organizations are evaluated by external stakeholders or how the crowdfunding process shapes the strategic decisions of emerging organizations. Our integrative review seeks to discover how the extant body of crowdfunding research challenges, extends, and contributes to the theoretical understanding of management and organizational phenomena and how these insights might drive further theoretical advancement. To do so, we inductively identify ten dominant topics that span the crowdfunding landscape across disciplines (268 articles) and synthesize the major findings within each topic based on relevant theoretical concepts. In doing so, we highlight how each topic area has applied and advanced various organizational theories. We then leverage the ten topics to articulate opportunities for future research uncovered by our review that provide potential contributions to theories germane to the management literature and to guide the next decade of crowdfunding research.