Crowd-funding: the next frontier of customer’s role

Recent initiatives that are surfacing in many markets are setting up a new boundary for the customer’s role: that of entrepreneurial support. In fact, of all resources a customer can directly provide into an offering, no theory yet included money in the form of financial support to innovations. This phenomenon is called crowd-funding, that is a collective effort by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Some (successful) business models that are emerging in different markets show that this approach is possible and, even more important, fruitful.