MANY finance students and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have a great deal in common: a deep interest in democratizing Wall Street.

At Yale, where I have been teaching for 25 years, I’ve been hearing a great deal lately from my students about financial innovations linked to social media. One such innovation, called crowdfunding, is embedded in the jobs bill signed into law by President Obama on Thursday. The idea involves Web sites that help many investors contribute small amounts of capital to projects that they read about online, and that might otherwise be starved for money.

Though the concept is being tried, in different ways, on sites like Kickstarter.com and Kiva.org, it is still very much an experiment, and its real-world benefits for small investors are still uncertain.

The new law, called the Jump-start Our Business Start-ups, or JOBS, Act, tries to regulate crowdfunding constructively. This innovation might be as well received as Wikipedia, which is constantly being updated and improved by a vast army of users. There may well be disappointments at first, but the concept can be tinkered with, like other democratizing financial innovations that have eventually delivered much good to society. I discuss many such examples in my new book, “Finance and the Good Society.”