Funding the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Lessons from Donation-Based Crowdfunding Platforms

This working paper explores research on the rise and operations of donation-based crowdfunding platforms and the early work on system builders, in order to develop actionable insights to build a suite of crowdfunding solutions relevant to address the funding challenges to implement on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The orienting arguments treat donation-based crowdfunding as an early days but now stable dominant design technology and examine that model in the context of the work of system building. The core methodology is based on comparative case study research, with unit of analysis being three successful donation crowdfunding platforms. The analysis is conducted using the University of Oxford Technology-Markets-Organizational Capabilities (TMO) vantage point on innovation strategy.