Intellectual Property Protection and Sustainability: Keys to Crowdfunding Success

Jäschke, H.; Schäper, T.; Tietze, F.; Foege, J. N.

Abstract

This study uses signaling theory to examine how intellectual property protection and sustainability influence the success of reward-based crowdfunding campaigns. Beyond that, we study how sustainability moderates the relationship between signaling quality through intellectual property protection and crowdfunding success. To test our hypotheses, we create a novel measure for intellectual property protection by using Machine-learning-based content analyses to build an intellectual property protection dictionary and then apply this dictionary to analyze 22,310 campaigns from the reward-based crowdfunding platform IndieGoGo between March 2015 and February 2023. Our findings from regression analyses suggest that signaling mechanisms conveyed through intellectual property protection embedded in campaign descriptions or sustainability indicated by campaign categories show a significant and positive relationship with crowdfunding success. However, sustainability emerges as a nuanced moderating influence, tempering the positive relationship between quality signals through intellectual property protection and crowdfunding success.

Keywords
Crowdfunding; Intellectual Property Protection; Sustainability; Text-based Measure; Content Analysis