Social Interaction and Crowdfunding Project Success: Moderating Roles of Product Development Stage and Product Innovativeness
研究了技术创业项目中，创业者主动更新信息、寻求反馈的社交互动对众筹成功的影响，发现产品处于构思阶段或渐进创新时，社交互动效果更好。
In recent years, crowdfunding has gained a lot of popularity as it helps to leverage the power of the crowd in the development and commercialization of new products. Thus, scholars are encouraged to explore factors that could enhance the success of these crowdfunding projects. This article investigates the impact of social interaction (i.e., proactively updating the potential funders and seeking their feedback) on the success of the crowdfunding project among technology ventures. Moreover, we examine the moderating role of the product characteristics, i.e., product development stage and product innovativeness, on the relationship between social interaction and crowdfunding success. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two studies. For the first study, we collected and analyzed data from 203 Kickstarter projects from the mobile apps technology category. For the second study, we designed two short experiments with four hypothetical mobile apps technology projects each and collected data from 132 crowdfunders about their likelihood of supporting the projects. Both studies clearly highlight that social interaction has a significant positive impact on project success in terms of receiving funding and feedback among technological ventures. This article also suggest that products in the ideation stage benefit more from social interaction than products in the commercialization stage. Moreover, in contrast to our assumption, our findings indicate that the positive relationship between social interaction and project success is stronger for products with incremental innovativeness than radical innovativeness. Our study adds to the existing literature in crowdfunding by highlighting ways by which entrepreneurs can improve the success of their crowdfunding projects.