Antecedences of the Success of Crowdsourcing Projects in Developing Crowd-Capital: Role of Project Learning and Social Support

This paper aims to investigate the antecedents of how crowdfunded projects succeed over crowdsourcing platforms (CFPs) on the Internet. As CFPs make quite a large number of open innovations feasible, little is known about knowledge sharing and cross-project learning (CPL) in association with the success of crowdfunded projects. No study has considered the success of CFP projects in terms of gaining crowd capital with respect to generating ideas, achieving innovation or meeting the budget plan. However, the notion of project learning occurring on CFPs is essential. Therefore, this paper first adopted theories of project management and social exchange in one study. A developing region in the Asia-Pacific area is selected for examination as a case study. By doing so, it fills the gap in terms of the scarce research on this type of market, which is full of potential and possibilities. An empirical study was conducted on 43 project teams that had successfully won crowdsourcing projects. The results reveal that CPL in relation to project learning and esteem support in relation to social support are both positively associated with the success of crowd-funded projects. The discussion, implications and contributions of the study are presented at the end of the paper.