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1. Introduction
Crowdfunding has become one of the most promising approaches for new ventures to incubate creative ideas and serves as a useful complement to conventional financial channels (Strausz, 2017). The most recognized crowdfunding model, and the one of interest in this study, is reward-based crowdfunding (Belleflamme et al., 2014; Mollick, 2014). In this transaction model, investors receive a reward (usually a product or service) for backing a campaign, rather than a monetary return. Kickstarter, the leading reward-based crowdfunding platform in the world, raised over 7.3 billion dollars from over 22 million backers as of May 2023, and this number continues to increase (Kickstarter, 2023).
The intense competition for entrepreneurs to enter crowdfunding markets has led to high failure rates in crowdfunding campaigns (de Larrea et al., 2019; Mollick, 2014). For example, Kickstarter reported a success rate of less than 40%, indicating that more than 60% of its campaigns failed to reach their fundraising goals. Since considerable time and effort have been devoted, a significant number of founders who experienced initial failures are still motivated to bring their creative ideas back into the crowdfunding market for a second attempt. Consequently, crowdfunding campaign relaunches have become an increasingly common and visible phenomenon. The crowdfunding literature has extensively investigated how campaign design features explain and predict campaign fundraising success (Belleflamme et al., 2014; Böckel et al., 2021; Kunz et al., 2017). These discussions generally consider crowdfunding campaigns to be static and independent releases, elucidating the determinants of single campaign success. Nevertheless, the failure–relaunch of a campaign is an interconnected dynamic process in which entrepreneurs may accumulate and interpret prior experience to strategically adapt to subsequent financing activities (Greenberg and Gerber, 2014; Leone and Schiavone, 2019; Piening et al., 2021). New theoretical perspectives and discussions are required to understand the performance of campaign relaunches better.
This study aims to bridge this gap in the literature by examining the role of founders’ learning efforts in crowdfunding markets. Drawing on the theoretical lens of organizational theories, we conceptualize founders’ learning as how they receive feedback from prior failures, convert it into knowledge and leverage it in behavioral changes (Argote et al., 2021). Following relevant studies, we empirically capture founders’ learning efforts by examining...