Crowdfunding the Academy
Tags: crowdfunding, Social Finance 3 Comments
Websites like Kickstarter, PledgeBank, and Spot.Us provide a way for the public to crowdfund creative research projects, but crowdfunding has not yet been largely adopted by the research community. This lack of adoption may seem surprising since crowdfunding promises to allow anyone from anywhere to directly contribute money towards any kind of research project, and this ostensibly would help researchers, especially those trying to research questions that interest the public. However, given the current mechanisms for crowdfunding, this lack of general adoption may be a blessing in disguise. There are some serious concerns about whether crowdfunding mechanisms, as they are currently designed, are appropriate for funding research grants. In this article, I hope to examine some of these concerns and offer some suggestions about how to address them.