Research On The Influence Of Internal And External Social Capital On Crowdfunding Performance

In recent years,crowdfunding has become a valuable alternative source of funding for entrepreneurs seeking externalfinancing.It is an emerging approach for entrepreneurs to implement their ideas despite not having traditional monetary resources such as banks and venture capital.Through crowdfunding platforms,the crowd can invest in business ideas and projects,and entrepreneurs can raise funds via the Internet.Previous crowdfunding studies have highlighted the role of social capital.But in discussing the impact of social capital on crowdfunding,researchers in the field of entrepreneurship,particularly those involved in seed funding,largely ignored the differences in internal and external social capital.Crowdfunding platforms do not solely act as financial mediators but also increasingly strive to develop their social network functions.The interactions within its online community is becoming the core of a crowdfunding platform,but the internal social capital generated by this interaction is rarely paid attention to by the academia.Based on the distinction of the internal and external social capital of crowdfunding platform,this paper studies the relationship between internal social capital and crowdfunding performance,external social capital and crowdfunding performance respectively,in order to explore in the field of crowdfunding,how does internal and external social capital affects crowdfunding performance?Based on the social capital theory and the existing literature research,combined with the proposition of exploratory case study,this paper discusses how the internal and external social capital affects the crowdfunding performance.Also,this paper puts forward the hypothesis and conceptual model and conducts an empirical study using 513 valid data collected from the Kickstarter crowdfunding website.According to the regression analysis of SPSS20.0 statistical analysis software,the following conclusions are drawn: the more Facebook friends the project sponsor had,the better performance of its projects will obtain;the more projects that the project sponsor supports on Kickstarter,the better performance of its projects will obtain.The external social capital and internal social capital of crowdfunding platform have significant positive influence on crowdfunding performance.At the same time,the results of data analysis show that the better quality of crowdfunding projects have,the effect of external social capital and internal social capital on crowdfunding performance will be further strengthened.This research has promoted the knowledge development of crowdfunding and entrepreneurship in a variety of ways and has important theoretical innovation.In addition,this paper has some practical implications for the operators of crowdfunding platforms and the originators(entrepreneurs)of the project.