Page - 215 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

the rejection rate at the application stage is quite high for risky borrowers, and capital ismore likely toflow towards borrowerswhoare already “bankable” (Tang 2019). 3.1.3 Case Study: Jolla—The Power of the Crowd In February 2010, Intel and Nokia merged their efforts to develop a Linux-based mobile operating system (OS), MeeGo, and agreed to work together to drive a broad ecosystem of partners (Grabham 2010). For a short time, this partnership seemed tomake progress, attracting companies likeNovell, AMDandAminocom to theMeeGo development effort. This all came to a shuddering stop exactly one year later when Nokia abandoned the partnership to switch toWindows Phone 7 (Reuters 2011). Intel soon followed and by October 2011 (Ricknas 2011), the MeeGo development effort had migrated to a new community effort namedMer (Mer Project 2011). The switch to Windows Phone 7 was a major blow to Nokia. This strategy change contributed significant to nearly 24,000 job losses (Blandford 2012). To support those made unemployed, Nokia launched the Bridge programme. Under this programme, an ex-employee can potentially receive up to €25,000 in seed funding for a start-upcompanyandup to four employeescancome together forone start-up (Blandford 2012). One such group of former Nokia employees came together to form anewcompany, Jolla, to evolve theMeeGo/MerOS. Jolla’s plan was to license the newOS, SailfishOS, to smartphonemanufacturers, but thiswas not without challenges. Sami Pienimaki, cofounder of Jolla, told Engadget: ‘We realised that we had to develop our own phone in order to bring life to the Sailfish operating system’ (Summers 2018). After suffering a number of setbacks, the Jolla phone launched in November 2013 to lukewarm reviews.Undeterred by the lacklustre reception, Jolla continued to market and sell its Sailfish-based smartphones. It also refocussed its efforts to demonstrate the capabilities of Sailfish OS in the emerging tablet market. A big question remained unanswered. How would it market and fund this new tablet effort? On 19November 2014, a year after launching its smartphone, the Jolla Tablet Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign was announced. Marc Dillon, the then CEO launched the campaign: ‘Crowdsourcing has been the foundation of somany amazing, inspiring and independent products, andwhat it stands for tapsdirectly into Jolla’sethos.Wehaveastrongworldwide community supporting us, andwewant to give people the opportunity to contribute early and takepart in the JollaTablet campaign.Bycontributingyoualsohave theopportunity to have your say in the actual development of the product’ (Jolla 2014a). As part of the Jolla Tablet campaign, thefirst thousand contributorswere given the opportunity to get a JollaTablet forUS$189 and assuming the campaign hit its targetofUS$380,000,product shipmentswould start in the secondquarter of2015. NewSources of Entrepreneurial Finance 221