Coolcrowd arranged its annual project meeting this time in Bergen at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) from 11.-12.03. The project meeting was followed by a three days writing workshop between researchers in WP2.3 and WP3.
The project meeting started with a general update from all WPs and was followed by a business model exercise in order to narrow down the business model attributes for first Coolcrowd scenarios that can be presented to the public (in WP4) to investigate their interest in a local climate crowdfunding scheme. This is an important step in order to design suitable business models for our external industry partners. Coolcrowd has now come to a stage where we are able to make informed decisions to narrow down our alternative concepts. The remaining empirical work with the farmers (WP3), the public (WP4) and the stakeholders (WP5) will help us to validate our business model designs.
In the afternoon session Coolcrowd’s affiliated PhD student Drozdova (NHH) presented her book chapter “Crowdfunding the development of new products and services”, which is co-authored by Kurtmollaiev, and Ingeborg Kleppe and part of the Handbook on the Sharing Economy that will come out in September 2019. The first day ended with a nice team dinner in the centre of Bergen to socialize a bit and continue with informal discussions.
The second day started with a guest lecture by Evangelos Bourelos from the Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the University of Gothenburg. Evangelos presented results from his recent study analyzing success factors in crowdfunding campaigns with a focus on social entrepreneurs. The day ended with an inspiring talk by Camilla Andersson from AROUND, an equity crowdfunding platform based in Bergen. The Coolcrowd team enjoys having close contact to the crowdfunding sector in order to validate our ideas with people from the sector and design real world relevant guidelines for implementation.
The next project meeting is already scheduled for June to catch up on all the activities that are happening at the moment across the WPs to ensure that these are well-coordinated.