Crowd-Based Entrepreneurship

The aim of this dissertation is to explore the innovation potential of crowdsourcing for entrepreneurship. The main focus is to discover how crowd-based infrastructures (i. e., crowdsourcing platforms and crowdfunding platforms) can support entrepreneurs in their innovation activities and how this new paradigm can be used to generate value for customers as well as actors of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The results of the dissertation show that crowdsourcing offers numerous opportunities to support entrepreneurs in finding, creating and developing novel ideas. It finds that crowd-based entrepreneurship changes how entrepreneurs conduct innovation. This is because 1.) crowd-based infrastructures provide new ways for entrepreneurs to identify and validate novel opportunities 2.) crowd-based infrastructures provide new ways to more easily integrate the crowd in the development of novel products and services and 3.) crowd-based mechanisms provide new ways to govern the actions of different actors thereby facilitating the creation of entirely new entrepreneurial ecosystems.