Advances in the Research Domain of Crowdfunding: A Systematic Literature Review

In the past half-decade, a considerable amount of literature has been published on the phenomenon of crowdfunding, considering its augmented role as an alternative form of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Crowdfunding is a method to obtain money from large audiences where each individual provides a small amount of money, instead of raising large sums from a small group of sophisticated investors [12]. Depending on the remuneration for the audience, crowdfunding has taken three major forms, namely, crowdlending, crowdinvesting, and reward crowdfunding. Regardless of the type of crowdfunding, it is considered to be two-sided process, where participants of the process are funders (the crowd), and funded entities (fundraisers). The process is enabled by an on-line tool – a crowdfunding platform. Considering this, the paper aims at revealing of underexplored participants of the crowdfunding process (funders, platforms, and fundraisers) in the research domain’s type (crowdlending, crowdfunding, and reward crowdfunding). To examine the state-of-the-art situation of the researched phenomenon, we use the systematic literature review (SLR) method, and synthesis. To conduct the analysis, we examined peer-reviewed articles of the research domain, published in 2021 journals indexed in data base Scopus. The results of the paper suggest that the research domain of crowdfunding in relation to the role of crowdinvesting and reward crowdfunding platforms is less examined in the literature, providing a fruitful area for further research.