Understanding the process dynamics of innovation financing: evidence from equity crowdfunding in Italy

Purpose This study examines the relationship between the innovation-related attributes of emerging Italian enterprises and the effectiveness of their equity crowdfunding (ECF) campaigns. It investigates how campaign design, firm-level characteristics and contextual factors interact to shape funding outcomes, drawing on business process management (BPM) and innovation–finance literature. Design/methodology/approach We analyse a dataset of 274 ECF campaigns launched between 2014 and 2023 by startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) registered in the Italian Business Register. The study adopts an exploratory–explanatory approach, integrating agglomerative hierarchical clustering and binomial logistic regression to assess the role of innovation attributes, firm-specific characteristics and campaign design features in explaining campaign outcomes. Findings The results indicate that innovation-related firm attributes alone exhibit limited discriminatory power in explaining ECF campaign success. Instead, outcomes are better accounted for by configurations of firm size, sector, timing and campaign structure. SMEs benefit more from the combined influence of organizational and campaign-related variables, whereas startups' outcomes are more strongly associated with sectoral alignment. Campaign failures remain difficult to predict, exposing the inadequacies of models based solely on firm data. Originality/value This study contributes to BPM and entrepreneurial finance research by framing ECF campaigns as configurable, digitally enabled business processes and by linking innovation management attributes with process-oriented analyses of campaign design. By combining clustering and regression techniques, the paper offers new insights into the configurational dynamics underlying ECF outcomes. The findings underscore the importance of adaptive, context-sensitive and temporally aware fundraising strategies and provide actionable implications for entrepreneurs, platform managers and policymakers engaged in innovation-oriented ECF.