Exploring ICO’s Phenomenon: Developing a Taxonomy of Academic and Non-academic Discourse

New ventures and private investors are showing increasing interest in innovative forms of fundraising. ICO is the abbreviation of Initial Coin Offering and it represents an innovation in entrepreneurial finance [1]. However, no study has ever developed a taxonomy of academic and not academic discourse related to this type of innovative financial tool. This paper aims to fill this gap by developing a taxonomy to investigate and categorize papers that discuss Initial Coin Offering phenomenon. This study is developed using a mixed methodology. The first stage of the research protocol regards the dataset definition and description. In the second stage we adopted the taxonomy process developed by Nickerson et al. [2]. The purpose of the present work is to develop a taxonomy with a set of dimensions each consisting of a set of characteristics that describes the objects in a specific study. We identified “Research Topics” as set of dimensions. It comprises eight dimensions: field of investigation, focus, actors, token type, extra topic, research issue, ICO phase, blockchain. In the taxonomy process we assigned a single value to every dimension. In the last section, we summarize some preliminary results, providing conclusions and discussions for future research.