Abstract:

Crowdfunding recently became a very popular way of funding, which allows funding almost everything, from minor personal projects to expensive commercial ones, as long as we can find investors. It may also be a new opportunity for entrepreneurial researchers, who may attract capital investment in companies that are promised to own developed technologies. Social financing of science is well suited to reduce some of the biggest problems of researchers, which is fundraising. First of all, there it is an alternative funding source for grants and sponsored research, which does not cover all the researcher's expenses. Due to high unpredictably of research projects, crowdfunding seems to be a very flexible way of additional funding. Secondly, it promotes scientific ventures and increases the interest of the general public. Scientific crowdfunding may support especially, commercialization of research results, which in Poland is still a difficult subject. On the one hand, Poland has a huge number of well-developed and highly-innovative companies, but on the other huge capital gap, on the contrary to other European countries, lack of institution which may support fundraising. However, there are available dedicated European Union science funding programs, which may help many of research project, but despite so many potential opportunities and having advanced technological solutions, not every scientist, or research and development company can benefit from that. Crowdfunding in Poland is a relatively new phenomenon, elusive out of a clear legal definition. It can effectively raise capital for innovative projects, but accompanied by some legal barriers that often prevent participation by investors. Currently in Poland regulation issues are not very favorable, partly due to the statutes of the capital market and problems concerning public collections. However, the legislator left some loopholes so some of the unfavorable law might be bypass. In this paper, authors considered scientific crowdfunding for specific conditions of Poland.

Keywords:

Crowdfunding, fundraising, research funding, research projects.