The Role of Entrepreneurial Intentions, Perceived Risk and Perceived Trust in Crowdfunding Intentions

Crowdfunding is a new financial and marketing tool, which is used to raise money for new projects and to promote innovative products. The aim of this paper is to investigate the influencing factors of crowdfunding intentions among students as future or current entrepreneurs. Drawing from the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, we analyse the data from two culturally and entrepreneurship-wise different countries, Romania and South Korea using PLS-SEM (N=441). Entrepreneurial intentions, perceived risk and perceived trust are found to positively influence crowdfunding intentions among business, economics and management students in both countries. We further check the influence of attitude towards entreprenurship, social norms and perceived behavioural control, entrepreneurial education and desire for success on entre-preneurial intentions, and report positive correlations for the whole analyzed sample. Moreover, social influence and facilitating conditions positively influence the entrepreneurs’ perceived risk, and effort expectancy and performance expectancy positively influence perceived trust. Whereas the Romanian sample does not exhibit any influence of social norms on entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial education is not correlated with entrepreneurial intentions in South Korea.