Partnership strategies between actors in participatory finance and actors in entrepreneurial support: what impacts on VSEs/SMEs?
In support of a comprehensive qualitative and longitudinal study, our article focuses on the partnership strategies put in place by the crowdfunding platforms (PF) with different actors in the ecosystem of entrepreneurial finance. We seek to describe and understand the extent to which they these partnerships little studied in the literature bring real value to enterprises in search of funding. On the theoretical level, we borrow the contributions of the agency theory enriched by the concepts of business ecosystem and two-sided market. Our empirical material focuses on thirty-eight semi-structured interviews conducted with managers of platforms, actors in the financial ecosystem and entrepreneurial support that includes both private and public actors, isolated territorial actors or anchored in a national network. Our results highlight three types of partnerships referring to various logics: logics of efficiency, expertise and trusted third parties or business networks. For the platforms, these partnerships respond both to a quest for legitimacy, animation of a territory and efficiency. However, our study suggests mixed results with regard to their scope at the level of enterprises: the expected network externalities are not always realized, suggesting some obstacles in the implementation of the partnership strategies, which limits the expected benefits for small and medium-sized enterprises.