How does the temporal textual uniqueness of a technological crowdfunding project influence its funding performance, and how are these effects shaped by the project's typicality and the founder’s prior experience?
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- This thesis investigates how temporal textual uniqueness, the degree to which a crowdfunding campaign’s description stands out semantically from others launched around the same time, shapes its success. Drawing on a dataset of 28,200 technology projects launched on Kickstarter between 2009 and 2019, the analysis leverages natural language processing techniques, notably TF-IDF and cosine similarity, to quantify linguistic originality. The results highlight an inverted U-shaped relationship: moderate levels of uniqueness enhance campaign performance, but excessive originality can backfire, potentially obscuring the message or undermining legitimacy. Interestingly, a founder’s prior entrepreneurial experience helps mitigate this risk, enabling more seasoned creators to reap greater benefits from being linguistically original. In contrast, typicality, or adherence to category norms, only plays a moderating role in non-linear models. Overall, these findings advance research on innovation signals, language framing, and entrepreneurial credibility, while offering actionable insights for crafting more effective crowdfunding narratives.