Crowdfunding for Social Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the literature on social entrepreneurship and crowdfunding to summarise existing themes and highlight future directions for research. The extant literature on the topic is quite fragmented, therefore we seek to identify common and unifying themes and highlight recent research trends and corresponding gaps. The systematic literature review has been conducted using the Scopus database and an open-ended time frame. Based on our analysis, four main research themes can be identified in the literature: (1) the benefits of crowdfunding for social entrepreneurial ventures; (2) the determinants of crowdfunding success for social entrepreneurial ventures; (3) the contribution of social entrepreneurial ventures financed via crowdfunding to the economy and society; and (4) the challenges of crowdfunding platforms focused on the financing of social entrepreneurial ventures. This study provides a summary of the most used theoretical frameworks in the business and management literature on crowdfunding and social ventures and proposes a number of avenues for future research.

Keywords:

• Systematic literature review
• crowdfunding
• social entrepreneurship

Author contribution

Nosheen Hussain: Writing – Original draft, visualisation. Francesca Di Pietro: conceptualisation, methodology, supervision, Writing – Reviewing and Editing. Pierangelo Rosati: conceptualisation, methodology, supervision, Writing – Reviewing and Editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The list of keywords used as filters was compiled based on the previous literature reviews conducted on crowdfunding (Alegre and Moleskis 2021; Böckel et al. 2021; Bouncken et al. 2015; Hoegen et al. 2018; Short et al. 2017) and social entrepreneurship (Bansal et al. 2019; Gupta et al. 2020; Lehner and Kansikas 2013; Saebi et al. 2019; van Lunenburg et al. 2020).

2 Peer debriefing can be defined as “the process of exposing oneself to a disinterested peer in a manner paralleling an analytic session and for the purpose of exploring aspects of the inquiry that might otherwise remain only implicit within the inquirer's mind” (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p. 308).