Crowdfunding as a New Financing Method for Entrepreneurs

One of the biggest challenges experienced by entrepreneurs while putting their business ideas into practice is access to finance resources. This situation creates the need for new financing models of entrepreneurs. As a new model in line with this need, crowdfunding platforms have become prominent in the recent period. The first crowdfunding examples in the world was observed in 2003, this date coincides with the year 2011 in Turkey. Crowdfunding is expected to reach the sector size of $ 100 billion in 2020. This size shows that there will be an important financing area for entrepreneurs. Crowdfunding also provides different funding models according to the needs of entrepreneurs and they can evaluate these models in keeping with their projects. Crowdfunding, observed as a fast-growing industry in the world, has not yet arrived at the expected size in the Turkey. The most important reason of this is the legal regulation gap for crowdfunding. The aim of this study is to make a literature survey about the crowdfunding concept, the advantages of crowdfunding models for entrepreneurs, the concepts of crowdsourcing and common-based co-production. The study that presents current situation regarding existing crowdfunding platforms and the legal regulation in Turkey, have a theoretical compilation characteristic for future research.