iNM Magazine Volume 7 | August 2015
Current Buzz
Greece being an empire with a long history and legacy,
why did it go into financial crisis? e roots of the crisis
run deep with many contributing factors, including the
highest pension spending in the European Union. But
there are also political and cultural factors. "e moment
of truth for Greece and for the euro zone approaches,"
said Hari Tsoukas, who was born in Karpenissi, Greece,
and is a professor of organization studies at Warwick
Business School in the U.K. Inefficient pension system,
too many benefits to cater, inability to control
unemployment and work culture, early retirement of the
employees, cultural and political issues are one side of the
coin whereas expenditure on Athens Olympics through
credit in 2004 being the major culprit on the other side to
pump out the huge reserve single handedly. What does
the concept of Crowd funding have to do with Greece bail
out? Here it goes. Greece was on the edge of a deadline to
pay 1.5 billion Euros back to the international monetary
fund, and a crowd funding campaign called the Greek
bailout fund wanted to help. e campaign set up on the
fund raising website Indiegogo, raised more than
€1,930,577 which was not just an insignificant amount
from a single source to pool up. ere is no doubt in
saying that crowd funding concept is helping Greece a lot
to improve their economic condition.
at an early stage. By having a crowd funding campaign,
the entrepreneur has the ability to engage the crowd and
receive comments, feedback, and ideas. is feedback is
extremely valuable, as it can help understand some
aspects of their business that were previously un-thought
of. It could also potentially inspire some other ideas.
One of the most famous examples of crowd
funding/crowd sourcing is STATUE OF UNITY project.
ough the motto of the project is not to collect funds but
collecting Iron which is a prime raw material to build the
project in which the main aim is to unite people together.
e estimated 1st phase of the project required INR 2900
Crores in which INR 1400 Crores for statue was raised
through the crowd by putting iron materials and funds
forward which worked as a PPP model. STATUE OF
UNITY project got a tremendous response which made a
huge impact on the Indian politics as well. e anti
spamming movement of the California based U.S. tech
giant, Google seeks support from the netizens to support
the cause through which they can come out with better
solutions over spamming activities and fraud detections.
Google wallet, even though not a familiar concept known
in the east, stands as a best example of practice of this
movement. Companies like Freecharge, Uber, Ola and so
on built their business models keeping the people in their
key strategies. Customers utilize the services of the
companies at lesser costs by increasing the volume of the
business through referrals and points system which also
comes under crowd funding as they are the key
contributors to the business in terms of developing the
brand name of the companies. Even though the benefits
are returned to the customers back, it can be considered
as crowd sourcing for business expansion with few
rewards and gifts as a token of gratitude and thanks to the
ones who put those gifts as utilization of the same
companies' services as their gratitude. Apart from these,
there are crowd funding activities like selling the old
items to support the causes the people chose, lending
unused things to put into a store by a group of people in a
group for better utilization purposes wherein people use
the resources for free and put them back in place once the
work is done.
Crowd funding from many individuals who give small
amounts has financed a number of high-profile projects
in recent years. Some campaigns seem to be intentionally
wacky— like the one in 2011 that raised $67,000 to pay for
a RoboCop statue in Detroit — while others seek to make
the world a better place.
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