The importance of the regional dimension of crowdfunding platforms: the case of Breton territory
Given the importance of VSEs/SMEs in the French economy, one of the challenges of public policies is to promote their growth and this requires, among other things, easy access to financing. Today, their main mode of financing remains the bank loan. However, banks do not always provide the requested funding. Based on this observation, we became interested in crowdfunding as a source of complementary funding. We identify about one hundred French platforms for financing business projects. Seven of them are located in the Breton territory and can largely finance the projects of companies present on this territory. This brings us to a questioning on what links a regional territory to a crowdfunding platform taking Breton as an example. To answer this questioning, our research was conducted in two stages, firstly by a phase to characterize the crowdfunding on our territory of study then by a comprehensive phase. The first phase consisted of drawing up a panorama of crowdfunding in Brittany. The comprehensive phase led us to classify the platforms into four categories, linking territory and platforms, and brought out the concept of “phygitalization,” which combines digital and physical presence.