Rosangela Feola

The Evolution of Crowdfunding Towards an Impact Investing Logic: The Case of Paulownia Social Project

In the last years, crowdfunding is arising as a widespread financing and fundraising tool, allowing to turn a large audience of customers into investors, individuals who can supply financial capital. Thus, crowdfunding represents a novel mechanism of fundraising embedded in the current financial innovation, which operates in order to produce convergent innovations that produce both economic and social outcomes. Studies are mainly aimed to understand which factors led a crowdfunding campaign towards the success. The whole research aims to analyse the new emerging financial tool, known as crowdfunding, with the purpose to understand and explain how it collaborates with the main traditional financial mechanisms used by enterprises. This study leds the author to recognize a new emerging shape for the crowdfunding, a structure which allows to take advantage of the traditional limits of funds of investment. Thus, both the capability to attract a great number of investors and the social content of the project-to-fund represent the push to move the crowd investment towards impact investing. The newness of the topic, the lack of certain and various data, the youth of the analyzed phenomenon, and the explorative nature of the research, pushed the authors to choose a case study approach.

Corporate Governance Models as a Bridge for Linking Academic and Non-Academic Entrepreneurs: The Case of Italian Spin-Offs.

This paper reports an investigation of governance issues in Italian academic spin-offs that arise from the need to balance the powers of two categories of partner: academic inventors and external investors (such as established companies and venture capital funds). The relationship between inventors and external investors, jointly pursuing a research-based entrepreneurial opportunity, provides an interesting case for the application of the agency theory construct to define adequate corporate governance procedures. The paper has two main objectives: to analyse the governance models adopted by academic spin-offs and to ascertain whether the very nature of entrepreneurial opportunity, and the associated uncertainties that a new venture faces, influence the choice of the governance model adopted. A sample group of 30 Italian academic spin-offs is analysed and three different governance models, inventor-led spin-offs, mixed-led spin-offs and investor-led spin-offs, are defined.

The Determinants of Entrepreneurial Intention of Young Researchers: Combining the Theory of Planned Behavior with the Triple Helix Model

Although the theme of academic spin‐off has received increasing consideration in entrepreneurship literature, little attention has been devoted to identifying the factors that drive young researchers to set up ventures based on the results of their research. To identify the determinants of academic entrepreneurial intention (AEI), we tested a model on a sample of Italian researchers using structural equation modeling and integrating the Triple Helix Model with the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The findings highlight that all psychological variables of TPB are relevant in predicting AEI, whereas only some contextual and exogenous variables (namely, government and industrial/financial support) directly influence AEI.