Schlagwort: European Union

European Crowdinvesting – What are the next steps? Ideas for a European Crowdinvesting Share

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Karsten Wenzlaff

For a long time, the European Crowdfunding Platforms were in a comfortable space:

  1. National regulators would scarcely consider Crowdinvesting an important topic, amidst the turmoil of the European Debt Crisis and the impending need to reign in the Banking Industry.
  2. Politicians of all parties would comment favorably on the innovative and creative approach to financing.
  3. National Crowdinvesting Platforms would seek their nice (both in terms of products and equity instrument) and would not be harmed much from other European competitors.
  4. The American platforms were busy building up their business model in the states, after the SEC finally allowed them to do any business in terms of Crowdinvesting at all.

Things have changed considerably. Continue reading „European Crowdinvesting – What are the next steps? Ideas for a European Crowdinvesting Share“

Concept Reengineering Exercise: rethinking public spaces in the digital transition

Karsten Wenzlaff

The Berlin-based multi-stakeholder think tank and ideation platform Internet & Society Co:llaboratory (collaboratory.de) and the EU Commission’s Onlife Initiative (ec.europa.eu…), invite to a special open space workshop in Berlin to explore impacts of global ICT developments within the policy context of the Digital Agenda for Europe and debate how the digital transition shakes established reference frameworks, which impact the public space, politics itself, and societal expectations toward policy-making. Invited are experts from academia, civil society, the private sector to think broadly on Europe’s digital agora within a one-day workshop in Germany’s capital. Continue reading „Concept Reengineering Exercise: rethinking public spaces in the digital transition“

Jobs, growth, innovation or creative disruption – how to sell Crowdfunding to the European Union?

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Karsten WenzlaffOne Comment

How to convince the European Union support the new crowdfunding industry? This was part of the discussion of the Pre-Launch Meeting of the European Crowdfunding Network in Brussels on 1st June 2012. Present were three dozen crowdfunding platforms and Crowdfunding experts from all over Europe. The meeting managed to create an exchange on regulatory issues, but to unite the diverse crowdfunding scene behind a single cause was still difficult. Could jobs, growth, innovation or disruption be such a mobilizing argument? A comment by Karsten Wenzlaff

The European Crowdfunding Network is a good idea – networking, exchanging information, lobbying the European Union and national legislators, creating industry codes and disseminating information about this emerging industry to the public is an important task. Therefore a lot of praise is due to the organizers of the European Crowdfunding Network who assembled a group of people dedicated to push for a better visibility of the emerging crowdfunding scene.

Sherwood Neiss, one the driving forces behind the JOBS Act in the US and author of the startup-excemption, kicked off the meeting by explaining how he and his colleagues lobbied the American goverment and Congress to make crowdinvesting possible. Continue reading „Jobs, growth, innovation or creative disruption – how to sell Crowdfunding to the European Union?“

Survey on Crowdfunding Regulation in Europe

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Karsten Wenzlaff6 Comments

Together with David Roethler, we are conducting a study about crowd-funding schemes in the cultural and creative industries sector in Europe on behalf of the European Expert Network on Culture (EENC), a network set-up by the European Commission.

The study shall provide recommendations concerning the potential regulation of crowd-funding schemes at the European and the national level. In particular, we are interested in crowdfunding with financial rewards, such as through micro-investments or micro-credits.

If you want to contribute to the study, please answer our survey at http://bit.ly/crowdfunding_experts. The deadline for responses is 22nd of August.

Issues that we want to address are:

  • Legal status of crowdfunding platforms
  • Legal status of crowdfunding investors
  • Cross-border access to crowdfunding
  • Application of financial markets regulation towards crowdfunding
  • Policy recommendations for regulation

From the people participating in the survey, we will compile a list of crowdfunding experts in Europe. If you answer our survey, please include a little bit of a background so we can contact you again for the crowdfunding expert list before publishing it.

We will also contribute to a crowdsourced matrix on business crowdfunding at Socialcompare.com. Feel free to add information there. There also similar tables on Alternative Money Schemes and Crowdfunding for creative purposes.