Abstract:

Crowdfunding provides an important financing mechanism for social entrepreneurship and a platform through which social entrepreneurs mobilize community support. Yet many crowdfunding campaigns fail, raising a critical but underexplored question: how do serial social entrepreneurs learn from prior crowdfunding campaigns—especially failures—and how does community feedback shape this learning process? Drawing on entrepreneurial learning theory, we distinguish between exploratory learning, captured by category switching across campaigns, and exploitative learning, reflected in the reuse and refinement of prior campaign content. We analyze a unique panel dataset of 935 Kickstarter launched by 236 serial social entrepreneurs and examine how prior campaign failure influences subsequent learning strategies, how these strategies affect performance, and how positive and negative community engagement moderates these relationships. We find that prior failure is more likely to trigger exploitative learning than exploratory change. Moreover, exploitative learning is associated with significantly higher subsequent campaign performance, whereas exploratory pivots do not improve outcomes. Importantly, community feedback conditions learning responses in counterintuitive ways: supportive engagement increases the likelihood of exploratory change after failure, while critical engagement reinforces exploitative persistence. These findings advance entrepreneurship theory by unpacking learning from failure as a socially embedded process, help reconcile inconsistent evidence on the experience–performance relationship in crowdfunding, and offer practical insights for social entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Entrepreneurship

Keywords: International entrepreneurship

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Prof Catherine Wang