SMU Assistant Professor of Marketing Anirban Mukherjee co-authored a research paper titled “Does the Crowd Support Innovation? Innovation Claims and Success on Kickstarter” together with researchers from HEC Paris, the University of Sydney and INSEAD. The findings indicated that funding efforts tended to be weakened if ideas were deemed to be novel and useful at the same time. “This is deeply disappointing as the premise of crowdfunding is to support creativity and innovation”, said Assistant Prof Mukherjee.

The study is a first on the Kickstarter community where crowdfunding efforts are used to back projects that pursue innovation. Data was gathered across 50,310 projects in nine product categories from the launch of Kickstarter in 2009 through to February 2017.