Emergent models of financial intermediation for innovative companies : from venture capital to crowdinvesting platforms

The recent financial crisis has accelerated the changes with regard to the spatial organization of financial channels. In direct investments, the venture capital industry in Switzerland used to be connected to national and international financial markets. Today these traditional direct investment players decline because their traditional business model is no longer suited for the current economic context. Instead, a new business model for direct investment has recently emerged while revitalizing this financial sector: crowdinvesting platforms exploit more intensively the possibilities opened by ICTs and of specialized, but dispersed, expertise. The paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of both business models as well as their contrasted time and space ways to deal with uncertainty.