Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
Crowdsourcing Week (CSW), a platform for promoting the crowd economy, has launched their own equity crowd-funding campaign.
The goal of the campaign is to increase their e-learning and consulting offerings, to spread crowd-sourcing how-to to a wider audience. This includes an online educational program to teach businesses about the crowd economy
While the current CSW community is in over 50 countries and hosts three global conferences yearly. In the Nordics, their events have spawned conversations about legislative issues and regulation with crowdfunding.
The Nordics and crowdfunding
One of the main issues with companies raising crowdfunding is their is a lack of checks and balances to maintain accountability. Because of this, there is a lot of suspicion of large-scale adaptation of crowdfunding. For example, in the US, up until 2013, there were laws in place that limited equity investments to accredited investors.
However, with their high levels of societal trust and near universal internet use, the Nordics have proved strong early adopters of the technology.
Within the Nordics, there are multiple crowdfunding organizations, including Invesdor from Finland, the Karolina Fund in Iceland, and Bidra of Norway.
Changing the rules for equity crowdfunding
Although crowdfunding is popular in the Nordics, the more classic reward-based model far outstrips equity-based models in terms of popularity. This is largely due to regulatory constraints, which crowdfunding evangelists like CSW hope to help change.
CSW is, in a sense, hoping to lead by example with their crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube, a London-based platform, and to show how a global organization can change it’s social reach and productivity through the crowd economy.
Should their goal of £80,000 be reached, the company will be able to focus on building the sorts of collaborative initiatives that take the stigma away from the crowd economy.
