Understanding the implications of equity crowdfunding on sustainability-oriented innovation and changes in agri-food systems: Insights into an open innovation approach

Sustainability may be a substantial competitive advantage for agri-food systems. Consumers increasingly demand that agri-food companies be more focused on sustainability's three main pillars (economic, environmental, and social). In this changing landscape, open innovation (OI) represents a valuable approach to address sustainability challenges, and crowdfunding platforms are emerging OI tools that companies increasingly adopt. Equity crowdfunding (ECF) may become a source of knowledge-based inputs to help agri-food companies to pursue sustainability-oriented innovations (SOIs) and use relationships with crowd investors to fine-tune the efforts on relevant sustainability-oriented challenges and related changes. This paper provides an investigation of a sample of agri-food businesses that have successfully used ECF to exploit knowledge-based crowd inputs. The research offers novel insights into how crowds influence the innovation trajectories of the companies they invest in through ECF. Our results show that even if agri-food businesses do not use process-related crowd inputs in implementing SOIs, they employ knowledge-based inputs for organizational innovation to foster social sustainability. They use those inputs on product innovations to enhance economic and environmental sustainability. Moreover, looking at the effects on improving food healthiness, the crowd inputs related to organizational innovations and those related to product innovations have opposite effects.