It's the Motivation Stupid!

This paper attempts to explain the success of secondary currencies. Success is defined as the degree to which the initiators of these currencies manage to reach their original goals. In order to do so, we draw on two explanatory factors: the motivation of a currency’s founder and the degree of organization. We employed a combination of qualitative interviews, secondary literature review and standardized questionnaires with seven secondary currency projects in Croatia (CROM), Germany (KannWas, Engelgeld), Greece (Ovolos, TEM) and the United Kingdom (Bristol Pound, Brixton Pound). The main findings are that projects which pursue several different motivations are more successful than those with fewer goals. As for the degree of organization, projects which score high on all dimensions of organization are correlated with higher project success. Building on this we propose a typology of two groups: Type 1 cases have low diversity of motivation and organization (CROM and Engelgeld) and Type 2 cases have high diversity of motivation and organization (Bristol Pound, Brixton Pound, and TEM). The two remaining cases, the Ovolos and the KannWas cannot be clearly assigned to any of the types. The "motivation-organization typology" can guide future research on the motivation of founding and using secondary currencies.