Equity Crowdfunding in Italy: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

Crowdfunding represents a crowdsourcing strategy for collecting from a large audience the financial resources required to launch an entrepreneurial project. It leverages on the power and wisdom of the crowd to identify, select and fund promising entrepreneurial projects. Regardless of its typology (equity, donation, lending or reward), crowdfunding provides a valuable support to sustain innovative ideas and projects, mainly at early-stage, thus contributing to diffuse the entrepreneurial culture worldwide. In particular, equity crowdfunding offers to investors the opportunity to participate actively to the development of an entrepreneurial project. For what concerns the Italian situation, a recent study highlighted three main issues hindering the development of the equity crowdfunding: the relationships with investors, the information asymmetries, and the project reliability. To face these issues, a wide set of norms and laws has been introduced to mitigate the risk and guarantee security and trust. Framed in these premises, this paper aims at reaching a twofold goal: 1) develop a deeper understanding of the equity crowdfunding scenario in Italy, also by analysing all the entrepreneurial projects submitted to the Italian equity crowdfunding platforms within February 2015; 2) collect and analyse the entrepreneurs’ insights and other existing issues, thus making some suggestions for improving the Italian equity crowdfunding system. The results of this study might be useful for policy makers in charge to manage the Italian regulation on crowdfunding, as well as to sensitize potential entrepreneurs in using crowdfunding to finance their startups or to support the arising of innovation and entrepreneurship within their companies. Finally, also private investors and financial operators can be interested in this study to evaluate if entering in this emerging business.