Abstract

Social innovation addresses social challenges, improving quality, productivity, and economic benefits. It fosters sustainable growth, job creation, and competitiveness by tackling social and environmental issues. However, securing funding for social innovation initiatives remains difficult due to risk perceptions. Crowdfunding has emerged as an effective financing alternative, by distributing risk among numerous individuals through digital platforms. With the lens of the signalling theory, this study investigates the impact of social innovation and other factors on the crowdfunding success of technological, agricultural and food projects on the La Ruche platform, which backs community projects in Quebec, Canada. Analyzing 203 projects that either achieved or missed their funding targets, we employ probit and logit models to provide comparative perspectives on marginal effects and predicted probabilities, thereby strengthening our analytical rigor. Our results indicate that higher funding levels and more contributors drive the success of crowdfunding campaigns, but this is significant only for agriculture and food projects. For technological projects, being classified as social innovation tends to send a negative signal to contributors, who do not seem to perceive the social or environmental benefits positively. Conversely, the social dimension of agriculture and food projects conveys a positive signal, facilitating funding acquisition.

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