How Does Fundraiser-claimed Product Innovation Influence Crowdfunding Outcomes

Abstract

The crowdfunding platforms have always been dedicated to supporting and inspiring innovative, and creative campaigns. However, limited research has been done to examine the fundraiser-claimed product innovation in campaign descriptions and its relation to fundraising performance. In this paper, we aim to tackle this important yet understudied problem. More specifically, we adopt a deep learning-based approach to extract sentences that contain innovation claims from project descriptions. We then conduct an empirical analysis to study the relation between fundraiser-claimed product innovation and crowdfunding performance by using a large sample consisting of 11,521 projects collected from Kickstarter across 4 project categories. Findings show a statistically significant association between fundraiser-claimed product innovation and crowdfunding performance. Additionally, the number of focal project innovation claims has a curvilinear relationship (inverted ‘U’ shape) with crowdfunding performance. Our study contributes to both product innovation detection and crowdfunding literature by demonstrating the association between product innovation presentation and crowdfunding performance.