Crowdfunding in the development of social media fanbase – case study of two competing ecosystems

Authors: Jari Jussila, Karan Menon, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Lester Allan Lasrado, Abid Hussain, Ravi Vatrapu, Hannu Kärkkäinen

& Jukka Huhtamäki

HICSS-49 Track - Organizational Systems and Technology

Mini-Track - Analytics and Decision Support for Ecosystems

Goal – Contribution of the Paper• The aim of the explorative study is to understand the role of crowdfunding in the

development of the fanbase using data from two recent cases of competing business ecosystems.

• We conducted an event study that employed social set analysis (SSA) of Facebook data to uncover and better understand the users’ interactions and brand associations before, during and after a crowdfunding campaign event.

• Key contribution of the study is the introduction of a new data source on co-creative interaction between companies and their customers, as well as an approach to support the study of ecosystems from a customer perspective.

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Crowdfunding Process

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Jolla Tablet and Nokia N1 was released together in Slush 2014

Reference :

Jolla (http://www.slush.org/2014/11/sailing-bigger-people-powered-jolla-announcing-sailfish-tablet/)Nokia N1 (http://www.slush.org/2014/11/nokia/)

Case Example – Jolla v Nokia

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Results – Temporal Distribution of two ecosystems

Temporal Distribution of Nokia’s Admin Facebook Dataposts (Posts, Comments and Likes)

Temporal Distribution of Jolla’s Admin Facebook Data (Posts, Comments and Likes)

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Results – Social Set Analysis

Social set analysis of Jolla Facebook data Social set analysis of Nokia Facebook data

 

“The increase in the user interaction for Jolla (194%) and the decline in the user interaction for Nokia (40.7%) from before to after the campaign period.”

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Results – SSA based Word Clouds

Word Cloud of most frequent words

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Propositions based on Results

Proposition 1. Crowdfunding increases fanbase engagement. Proposition 2. Crowdfunding contributes to sustainability of product brand associations.

Proposition 3. Crowdfunding speeds up the evolution of business ecosystems

Future Research (Data requirements)

1. Data that represents the interconnections and interactions between individual social media actors

2. Data from the crowdfunding platforms representing the individual investments both for the focal campaign(s) under investigations as well as related campaigns

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Implications on Ecosystem Research• Lead users helping to co-create value with companies

• Ecosystem complementors co-offer new products to create additional value

• Complementors can develop products (Case makers in case of Jolla)

• The kinds of insights stemming bottom up from consumers complement the other novel views into business and innovation ecosystem interconnections, including Deals and Alliances, Executives and Finance, Angels and Start-ups

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Implications for Decision/Policy-Making• Presented approach allows for close-to-real-time system-level view to

emerging business and innovation ecosystems - valuable insights for foresight, decision making and impact measurement

• Crowdfunding per se introduces new interesting means for policy making:

first experiments in giving matching government/public funding for successful crowdfunding campaigns taking place in Finland.

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Mahalo!

Kiitos!

Thank you!

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This research was partly funded by TEKES – Finnish funding agency for Innovation