TY - JOUR 
A1 - Schenk, Andreas Michael
T1 - Crowdfunding in the context of traditional financing for innovative SMEs
Y1 - 2015
SN - 20491050
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11268/6249
AB - The innovator's choice to find the optimal financing is complex and influenced by his individual requirements as well as SME specific financial constraints in the market. The lack of experience and supply with external sources of finance is a serious inhibiting factor for innovation in SMEs. Data shows that most SMEs are familiar with bank loans but rarely have contact or access to mezzanine and equity capital. Debt capital is not always available, is more expensive for innovative ventures and further weakens the credit rating. Hence, mezzanine and equity capital are often seen as yet underestimated forms of financing. But due to an equity gap in the market, innovative SMEs also struggle to acquire fresh capital in form of equity. While still being negligible small in comparison, crowdfunding attempts to grow into several financial areas and has promising potential to open up new sources of capital for entrepreneurs and innovative SMEs. This paper presents a comparative theoretical study of current financial alternatives with special regard to innovative ventures. It identifies the relevant properties on profound academic literature and the empirical evidence on its fit to innovation financing is reviewed. The paper aims to contribute to the discussion of financial constraints for innovative SMEs and will give indications for further research. Results show that crowdfunding has distinct advantages in its value creation by the funding community, but is still exceptional in larger innovative projects and may then have high requirements regarding human and capital resources. While traditional forms of financing still have distinct advantages for their own, synergies and combinations with crowdfunding will be discussed based on their individual characteristics. It may be promising to combine traditional and new innovative forms of financing to gain synergy effects and to mitigate information asymmetries for traditional investors.
KW - Crowdfunding
KW - Emprendedores
KW - Financiación
KW - Comportamiento innovador
LA - eng
ER -