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As I wrote yesterday post a number kept mulling in my mind: 1 million $. That is the amount of money CENTR is asking from unknown people all over the world. And the amazing thing is that they are likely to get it on the bases of trust among a community that has no physical ties.
So I went on Kickstarter statistics to see the dimension of this phenomena and that amazed me even more than the power of technology evolution.
As of May 22nd they have collected over 1.1 billion $ and funded over 62 thousands projects! The backers have been over 6.2 millions with over 15 million pledges.
Interestingly, out of 1.1 billion dollars pledged, 964 million dollars were actually used (which means that the project reached the desired amount of money it asked for) whilst 132 million were not actually paid since the projects upon which they were pledged did not reached the desired amount of money.
The percentage of successful funding is over 43% and that is really high, considering that the success rate with Venture Capital funding is less than 10%.
Also the average successful project funding was around a request for 10,000$ but a significant number of projects succeeded with a higher demand (1,237 got between 100,000 and 1 million $, 65 raised 1 million $).
These figures are impressive from several point of view. First they show how many people are looking at the web for funding their innovative ideas, second how many people respond to this (clearly the two are linked) and trust the community.
I cannot help but compare these with the work we are doing at the EIT ICT Labs. We are investing on innovative start ups and the money we are providing them is peanuts, a few ten thousands €, but then of course we are providing them with a variety of support services that can make the difference, like connection, business plan support, technology transfer, soft landing, access to major funding Agencies… and coaching.
We are also stimulating innovation in various ways, the latest is the Idea Challenge.
And yet, the web makes possibile to trade ideas and foster innovation as never before. I remember a friend of mine from India several years ago telling me that to be innovative you only need a pencil and a sheet of paper. Probably today he would tell me that to be innovative it only takes a keyboard and an Internet connection. The times are changing but the "brain" is still at the core of innovation.
