It's the dawn of Italian crowdfunding. Photographing the first flashes of it is the Emblema Foundation which organizes the fifth edition of the Research Exchange, in Bologna, a two-day event open to groups, PhDs and spin-offs, all with a clear common goal: innovation.
An uncertain dawn, still, but which promises to be bright. The value of the research projects financed so far with the 54 crowdfunding platforms in Italy (41 active, 13 in the launch phase) exceeds 30 million euros. Drops in the ocean, if referred to the world scenario, but numbers that indicate an evident trend, albeit still embryonic, so much so that from October last year to today seven million euros have been raised by these platforms.
The main problem remains that of knowledge of the instrument, which is still scarce. “The real bet – confirms Tommaso Aiello, CEO of Fondazione Emblema – is to tell it: to explain how it works, what the regulatory framework is. Then each university will decide how to use it. But, obeying a social logic, if it really manages to get going we must assume that growth will not be linear but exponential".
In the specifics of the speech, in Italy the most widespread financing model is the reward-based, where lenders receive a prize or a non-monetary reward, followed by donatione based, where those who pay a sum receive nothing in return. Despite everything, however, a large part of the projects that try to raise funding in these ways continue to fail.
