Joining the In-Crowd: How Social Entrepreneurship is Going Mainstream

The popularity of crowd-funding continues to explode, but is it just an early stage in the web community's ongoing quest to find ways of circumventing traditional financial service institutions? “The next logical step is crowd investment and crowd equity, where investors take on property rights in the ventures they back,” says Daniel Schlagwein from the Australian School of Business. But there are unresolved legal issues and regulators are hovering as the sums get bigger. With banks already jumping on to the crowd-funding bandwagon, social entrepreneurship may be in danger of losing its cool.