Identifying challenges in crowdfunded product development: a review of Kickstarter projects

Abstract

This paper provides an empirical review of the reward-based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com, with the aim to explore and identify challenges in crowdfunded product development, which consequently can lead to failure of the crowdfunding campaign. The review was based on the analysis of a total of 144 successfully funded ‘technology’ campaigns, which all concerned the creation of physical consumer hardware preordered by campaign backers. The analysis was built around a failure mode model, which was established through a pre-study. The study reveals that (i) no more than 32% of the campaigns managed to deliver the crowdfunded products on time, and, if campaigns are delayed, (ii) there is a significantly higher probability that the delivered products might lack expected attributes. The causes for delay have many reasons, but (iii) a set of particular product development issues were identified as the main challenges. A better understanding of crowdfunded product development can help researchers and practitioners to better understand and utilize the opportunities of this new product development paradigm.

From Idea to Production: A Retrospective and Longitudinal Case Study of Prototypes and Prototyping Strategies

“…Thus, the lack of consideration for production methods in the previous development cycle lead to the several redesigns. Design for manufacturing is considered to be one of the main challenges faced by hardware startups [36], and our analysis show that it was also the case for PeeFence, as they had to scale their production significantly in each cycle. Recent studies that investigate the negative consequences of additive manufacturing make similar conclusions [34,35].…”

Crowdfunding for Design Innovation: Prediction Model With Critical Factors

“…The rapid growth of crowdfunding has boosted academic research and related legislation such as the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS) [23]. Primary research interests include the descriptive study of the crowdfunding phenomenon [3], [24], the taxonomy of crowdfunding processes [6], [12], policy facilitating crowdfunding [8], [25], prediction of crowdfunding success [15] and sources of delays or cancellations of successfully crowdfunded product development [2], and applications of crowdfunding campaigns to entrepreneurship education [4]. Specifically, prediction-oriented studies have suggested that social networks [13], [26] and campaign qualities [14], [27] play essential roles in crowdfunding success.…”

“…The RWW framework had been used by many established companies such as 3M and General Electric to evaluate internal innovation projects for go/kill decisions [35] and later modified to evaluate technology startups for accelerator selection [36]. In particular, the RWW framework allows one to evaluate a wide spectrum of product, market, team, risk, and strategic factors of an innovation project by answering guiding questions in three main aspects [2]:…”

“…However, Indiegogo also provides a flexible funding option so that the creators can collect any amount of funds raised, regardless of whether the funding goal is reached. Prior crowdfunding research primarily used data from only one source -Kickstarter [2], [13], [14], [42]. Therefore, to study different platforms, a generic measure of crowdfunding success is needed.…”

Do Machine Learning and Business Analytics Approaches Answer the Question of ‘Will Your Kickstarter Project be Successful?

“…According to the review, the ability of campaign starters to make promises about product features and the project features created in this context plays an important role in the success of the project. The study also shows how crowdfunding platforms can be used in research with both data libraries and product development cases (Jensen & Özkil, 2018). The research conducted by Qianzhou and his team focuses mainly on the main points of the projects such as category and target.…”