Acceptance of Crowdfunding of Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Crowdfunding is an alternative fundraising method, which draws a small amount of money from each investor, in a pool of investors, via internet. It is a concept that is gaining the attention of both academics and practitioners, as a potential tool to resolve funding problems of startups, which are not financially sound enough to access formal financial markets. However, crowdfunding literature consists more of interdisciplinary researches, especially regarding applicability of it as a funding source for small enterprises. Therefore, studying the factors that affect the acceptance of crowdfunding is an important area of research. Technology acceptance models can be applied in crowdfunding research, since it is treated as a type of information system. Previous studies have used technology acceptance models to explain investor behavior of crowdfunding with technological factors and environmental factors. Furthermore, entrepreneurs or project creators have been ignored by the researchers. Hence, the objective of the study is to perform a desk research on technology acceptance models related to acceptance of crowdfunding of entrepreneurs. The review highlights that there is a limitation of using technology acceptance model to explain the behavior of entrepreneurs, since those theories do not consider individual factors. Accordingly, the study proposes an integrated model of unified theory of acceptance, and use of technology and entrepreneurial potential model, for the purpose of better reflection of entrepreneur‟s attitudes and intention towards using crowdfunding. Future studies can be focused on test the model with empirical data for further development of entrepreneurial crowdfunding acceptance model.