The Evolution of Crowdfunding Towards an Impact Investing Logic: The Case of Paulownia Social Project

In the last years, crowdfunding is arising as a widespread financing and fundraising tool, allowing to turn a large audience of customers into investors, individuals who can supply financial capital. Thus, crowdfunding represents a novel mechanism of fundraising embedded in the current financial innovation, which operates in order to produce convergent innovations that produce both economic and social outcomes. Studies are mainly aimed to understand which factors led a crowdfunding campaign towards the success. The whole research aims to analyze the new emerging financial tool, known as crowdfunding, with the purpose to understand and explain how it collaborates with the main traditional financial mechanisms used by enterprises. This study led the author to recognize a new emerging shape for the crowdfunding, a structure which allows to take advantage of the traditional limits of funds of investment. Thus, both the capability to attract a great number of investors and the social content of the project-to-fund represent the push to move the crowd investment towards impact investing. The newness of the topic, the lack of certain and various data, the youth of the analyzed phenomenon, and the explorative nature of the research, pushed the authors to choose a case study approach.