Today, Professor Lars Hornuf will present two ongoing research projects at the Data Science Forum, which illustrate the methods and data used in state-of-the-art business research. Does it matter for business success how prominent an investor is? Together with his coauthor Professor Daniel Blaseg from ESADE Business School Lars Hornuf analyzes the determinants of funding success and consequent firm performance of 2768 early-stage ventures that made a business pitch during the Canadian, German, UK or US versions of the reality television show Dragons’ Den. The data was in part scraped from public sources and classified using machine learning tools. What motivates crowd funders to support projects on online crowdfunding platforms? To answer this question, Lars Hornuf and his coauthor Professor Christoph Siemroth from Essex University apply the nowadays “gold-standard” in economics and business research: field experiments. Lars Hornuf will give a brief introduction why and how this method is applied today.