Relational Capital and Crowdfunding: An Italian Woman Startup Case Study

Abstract: Crowdfunding is a new channel of finance for companies, focusing on gender studies one of the main causes of the failure of female enterprise development are under-capitalization and the barrier to credit access. In this way, some intangible factors, as relational capital, can play a relevant role to connect the woman entrepreneur by new stakeholders, like crowd-funders, and overcome the barriers. For these reasons, the aim of this paper is to analyse if relational capital (RC) can help the woman start-up (WSU) to fundraise during the early stage. Following previous studies about start-ups as means of development for economic context and about the role of innovative financial tools (e.g., crowdfunding) in their financial structure, the study investigated whether RC and the success of crowdfunding operations were connected. The literature results confirm a gap between crowdfunding and female start-ups (Paoloni et al. 2019). In this way, this research is supported by a qualitative research methodology using a single case study (Yin, 2009). Thus, the paper applies the CAOS model of micro-entrepreneurship by Paoloni (2011). Using such model, we can share some factors and classify different types of connections, identifying several kinds of existing relations. The findings of this explorative research show a positive effect of relational capital for female start-up into fundraising operations. Woman start-up is able to fundraise if establishes a permanent and formal relationship with the external environment. This paper contributes to expanding the scientific literature on gender studies, relational capital and the use of alternative ways of finance fields. Managerial implication is to advance knowledge and practice in the area of woman in business and use -in start-up stage- of relational capital to develop processes of fundraising across innovative financial tools, as crowdfunding. The limitation of our research concern the SMEs (start-up) dimension. Analysis of data has been available only through direct interviews with female entrepreneurship. Future research perspectives will be focused on the acquisition of more data on the topic of woman start-up and crowdfunding. In this way, we reply the analysis by multiple case study and we would try to understand which relational capital’s factors recurring for the success of fundraising operation.