Exploring the development of environmentally sustainable products through reward-based crowdfunding

Literature on crowdfunding is rapidly expanding by exploring typologies of crowdfunding projects, success factors of the projects, and how success factors might change depending on the project typologies. Firstly, based on the literature that suggests crowdfunding platforms provide a good alternative for financing innovative ideas, the present exploratory research aims to analyze how the crowdfunding instrument has been used in supporting the development of sustainable products. Secondly, based on researches that focus on success factors of crowdfunding campaigns, the present work aims to explore the success determinants of projects developing sustainable products. The results of the investigation show that the impact of crowdfunding in supporting the development and commercialization of sustainable products is quite marginal and only a few successful projects showed a high impact potential to contribute to the pathway to more sustainability by directing influencing incumbents. Moreover, through an in-depth examination of the campaigns aimed at developing sustainable products, we found that adopting just a generic keyword (i.e. sustainable, ecologic) to describe a sustainable product might weaken the success probability of the campaign. In light of the results achieved, the paper formulates some managerial suggestions illustrating how crowdfunding platforms could stimulate the collection of more environmentally friendly projects.