The Role of Serial Crowdfunding in Startup Firms’ Innovative Activities

Crowdfunding (CF) has attracted increasing attention from researchers and many studies have been conducted in order toshed light over a variety of aspects of the phenomenon, especially when a start-up is involved in.Recently, CF has been investigated also in the light of the “seriality” of CF campaigns, i.e. the participation to more than one campaign by the startup. The existing studies in this stream of research, focus mainly on how “serial CF” affects the management of the subsequent campaigns and their performance, thus adopting a merely “tactical” perspective on the phenomenon. More importantly, there is a lack of in-depth studies over the actual processes characterizing serial CF and its role in innovation strategies and practices.Consistently with the above mentioned gaps in literature, the main goal of this paper is thus to analyze more in depth the role of serial CF in innovation strategies adopted by start-up firms, shedding light on the micro-processes involved, in line with the recent call for exploring the “non-financial” dimension of CF.To this aim the paper adopts a qualitative methodology based on an exploratory case-study of a company actively exploiting multiple CF campaigns mostly as opportunities for innovation. The case offers offers insights over the role of serial CF in innovation processes.