Supporting transformational entrepreneurship through crowdfunding: The BiUniCrowd case

Transformational entrepreneurship is a strategy to reconcile social and economic development, by holistically combining inclusivity and innovation. On the one hand, it revolves around the ability of entrepreneurs to face global challenges to improve the well-being of communities; on the other, it relies on community-based decision-making to ease the formation of ecosystems meant to foster value creation, appropriation, and distribution. Digital platforms have offered a promising tool for transformational entrepreneurship to advance. For example, crowdfunding has established itself as one of the emerging contexts to appreciate how transformational entrepreneurship takes place in the real world by catalysing collaboration. As such, it is positioned to unleash the potential of public-private partnerships to favour socio-economic development from the ground up. This chapter aims to investigate the match-funding (a type of crowdfunding) programme run by the Italian public University of Milan – Bicocca. The project, named BiUniCrowd, started in 2018 and, since then, has had multiple calls, more than 100 applications and funded projects focusing on tackling contemporary challenges, and the active involvement of thousands of backers along with several affiliate partners. Findings highlight the pivoting role played by digital platforms to help universities encourage transformational entrepreneurship whilst fulfilling their third mission.