Green Orientation and Crowdfunding Success of Green Projects : Moderating Role of Project Characteristics

Abstract

The study investigates the impact of green orientation on crowdfunding success and the moderating role of project characteristics, i.e., project duration, project stage, and project innovativeness, on the green orientation-crowdfunding success relationship. We test our hypothesis using two studies. Our first study uses 151 energy and green technology crowdfunding ventures from the Indigogo platform. For our second study, we designed three experiments with four hypothetical green crowdfunding projects each and collected data from 119 crowdfunders about their likelihood of funding the projects. The results of both studies highlighted the significant positive impact of green orientation on crowdfunding success. Moreover, in line with our expectation, projects with longer duration and high innovativeness leverage the benefit of green orientation significantly higher than projects with shorter duration and low innovativeness, respectively. However, in contrast to our hypothesis, the impact of green orientation on crowdfunding success was much stronger among projects in advanced stages than in early stages. We also discuss the implication of our findings on research and practice.