AmCham Macedonia Summer 2014 (Issue 42) | Page 20

ANALYSIS ideas. And they were all quite selective. Innovation and creativity yearned for realization, and countless opportunities and ideas were lost forever. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the need to support innovation was eventually met by innovation itself. Just as the PC brought computers to the masses, crowdfunding put funding of innovation in the hands of the crowd. Crowdfunding in Macedonia The crowdfunding concept is new for Macedonia. The first platform of this kind, letsfundit.mk, was launched in January 2014. Macedonia needed a crowdfunding platform not only because innovators here have very limited local financing opportunities, but also because the crowd in Macedonia is open to new concepts and global emerging trends and have a tradition of helping one another. The world over, backers generally want to support projects that impact them locally. Therefore, letsfundit.mk was launched as the first local, Macedonian crowdfunding service which accepts projects, ideas, and initiatives only from Macedonia. 20 In the beginning, many assumed crowdfunding would not work in Macedonia, that it is a concept plausible only in more developed countries. However, the first 150 days of crowdfunding in Macedonia, proved t