The Role of Crowdfunding in Cultural Entrepreneurship: A Business Network Perspective

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of crowdfunding (CF) in cultural entrepreneurship processes by adopting a Business Network perspective. The literature on Cultural Entrepreneurship emphasises the distinctive features of such ventures and portrays an entirely different entrepreneurial journey. Concurrently, CF is emerging as a key topic in management research and an innovative and ‘clever’ solution for start-up ventures. However, thus far, the analysis of the role of CF in cultural start-up processes is limited. Moreover, from our perspective, existing literature on CF lacks the ability to understand the actual complexity of the “networked” nature of such contexts. Therefore, we have adopted the Business Network perspective of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group (IMP) to study two highly revelatory cultural projects (i.e., RATATÀ Festival and BRUTI card game) backed by the reward based CF platform Ulule. We believe that studying the role of CF in cultural entrepreneurship through the lens of the Business Network perspective provides a fine-grained analysis of the development paths of cultural ventures in terms of key actors and related resources, as well as in terms of interconnected activities.