RCoins – citizens become entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT

As a recent phenomenon, crowdfunding has been positively influencing entrepreneurial financing and has been leading the way to a democratization of financial opportunities for entrepreneurs and backers. With the ambition to positively impact the entrepreneurial processes in crowdfunding markets, the RCoins project evolves around the idea of all citizens becoming sustainable investors, while helping transition from a linear to a circular economy. Today, the platform users receive 1 RCoin for every recycled bottle and use their RCoins for offers and discounts or for donations to charities. The next step will be to encourage citizens to be more motivated toward plastic bottle recycling, incentivizing them via an innovative crowd-investment reward platform. As part of an entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem, RCoins will help increase the adoption of innovation in sustainable entrepreneurship and will contribute to resolving social and environmental issues by identifying and creating entrepreneurial opportunities.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowdinvesting
• entrepreneurial financing
• sustainable entrepreneurship
• plastic recycling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ https://www.innosuisse.ch/inno/en/home.html.

Innosuisse promotes SMEs, start-ups and other Swiss organizations in their R&D activities.