Crowdfunding for Entrepreneurial Education

Abstract

This paper applies the concept of a crowdsourcing campaign in the context of entrepreneurial education, and reports the perception of participants in such application in a large business school. The classroom task is to prepare a crowdfunding campaign for their university in a freely available digital platform, having identified a relevant problem on campus. The problem identification is based on market research, where problems disrupting the school are found. To implement student's developed “solutions”, crowdsourcing campaigns are created to expose ideas to market validation, and nudge students to communicate with customers and suppliers. The ‘successful' perceptions of participants signal a large potential for this ‘exercise', as campaigns can be successful, leading to the creation of micro-organizations to run these projects and impact communities positively. Of course, future research should establish correlation between crowdsourcing campaigns and likelihood of starting businesses and social ventures.