Crowdfunding Platforms and the Threat of Copycats

Scholarly attention on crowdfunding has primarily focused on understanding campaign success. What has yet to be understood are the implications of worldwide visibility to the ventures on these platforms, where economic actors from other institutional environments can capitalize on the entrepreneur’s idea with little consequence. Using the exemplar of FinalStraw, we argue that because the entrepreneurial venture is displayed to varying economic actors across differing institutional environments, the venture must rethink its financing, marketing, and R&D practices. Our findings have implications for information asymmetry inherent in open vs. closed systems and the sense of community engendered by crowdfunding platforms.