The Peculiarities of Equity Crowdfunding for Cultural Heritage: a New Approach to Innovation

This paper addresses the topic of alternative financing for the cultural heritage sector, investigating equity crowdfunding as a potential means to increase financial resilience. Indeed, the allocation of funds to the cultural heritage sector has progressively decreased over the last fifteen years, making traditional financial models for cultural heritage no longer maintainable especially in times of crisis and economic downturn (Jelinčić and Šveb, 2021). As a result, both academics and practitioners have called for a higher degree of differentiation of sources of funding, that include also the exploration of crowdfunding as a promising funding means (Dalla Chiesa and Handke 2020; Rykkja et al., 2020; Zhao and Shneor, 2020). However, this funding tool is just partially used in the cultural and creative sector, especially in its most innovative models such as equity crowdfunding (Massolution, 2015; Rykkja et al., 2020). This paper aims to fill this research gap: it questions equity crowdfunding as a viable tool to finance cultural heritage interventions and explores the success factors and peculiarities of equity crowdfunding campaigns for cultural heritage. By means of a QCA -Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the research indicates that equity crowdfunding could raise considerable amounts of funds as those needed in heritage interventions. Moreover, it points out that equity crowdfunding campaigns for cultural heritage differ from traditional equity crowdfunding campaigns of other sectors, since it privileges signals related to emotional aspects and social and community values rather than those related to financial aspects.