Abstract

Crowdfunding is a widespread approach for funding creative projects through an open call for support over the internet. Recently, companies have started to adopt this approach to engage employees into their innovation management processes, calling it enterprise crowdfunding. Employees publish own proposals for innovation projects on an internal crowdfunding site and invest companyendowed money on proposals of others. Although the underlying mechanism remains the same, enterprise crowdfunding exhibits distinct differences to crowdfunding on the internet such as employees investing corporate money rather than their own. With this study, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of funding success in enterprise crowdfunding. For this, we build on data from one of the hitherto largest enterprise crowdfunding implementations run at IBM in 2014. Employees submitted 204 ideas for internal mobile apps and IBM endowed four million US dollars to staff members. We investigate the role of idea and description characteristics for funding success. While idea characteristics such as novelty, relevance and feasibility do not explain proposal success, the degree of elaboration and the extent of follow-on costs do. Description characteristics affect the significant idea characteristics and, thus, indirectly funding success.

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