Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of social responsibility of crowdfunding industry, an industry that is expanding rapidly as an alternative source of finance and new business model, while failing to sufficiently advance and adhere to good social responsibility practices. The paper develops a stakeholder-based rating system of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among crowdfunding platforms that could assist in making this industry more trustworthy and robust.

The approach is based on exploratory research methodology, using interviews as data collection tool, to develop an initial understanding of the dimension and issues that define a construct for measuring the social responsibility of crowdfunding businesses.

The paper offers a preliminary construct for measuring the social responsibility of crowdfunding businesses, which identifies the stakeholders’ dimensions to be measured, assigned a relative weight for those stakeholders within an aggregated CSR measure and identified the social responsibility issues to be gauged.

This research adds to the understanding of the under studied subject of social responsibility of crowdfunding industry by developing a stakeholder-based rating system of CSR among crowdfunding businesses that could assist in making this industry more trustworthy and robust, thereby laying out an agenda for further research on the topic.

To investigate small business success versus failure prediction variables in the emerging market of Sri Lanka.

Survey research was used to collect data in Sri Lanka with a sample size of 450 small businesses (200 failed and 250 successful) based on 10 of the 15 Lussier success versus failure prediction model variables.

The results reveal significant differences between all 10 successful and failed variables tested.

The findings indicate that small business owners and managers can benefit from starting their business with adequate capital, by maintaining good records with financial control, having prior business and management experience, developing a business plan, having higher levels of education, being able to staff the business, starting the business during the early stages of the product life cycle, having partners, and having marketing expertise.

This is the first major small business success versus failure study conducted in Sri Lanka. Results support the Lussier model’s validity in Sri Lanka, reinforcing its global validity and moving toward a theory; while demonstrating similarity to those in other economies. There is no accepted theory of success vs failure, thus this study is a foundation for further research and comparisons between developed countries and emerging markets.