TY - GEN
T1 - When the going gets tough
T2 - 33rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, DTM 2021, Held as Part of the ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC-CIE 2021
AU - Mahan, Tobias
AU - Saravanan, Pratima
AU - Krishnakumar, Sandeep
AU - Nolte, Hannah
AU - McComb, Christopher
AU - Menold, Jessica
N1 - Funding Information:
The fourth author’s research assistantship is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through cooperative agreement N66001-17-4064. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2021 by ASME.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter provide new product developers with a novel and readily accessible platform to interact with potential customers, seek funding, and gain valuable feedback from target users. Successful startup design processes are often praised due to startups’ agility and ability to adapt to changing markets under extreme resource constraints. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the market in a number of significant ways, and publicly available data on Kickstarter provides valuable insight into the fundamental ways that product developers adapt to volatiles markets created by a global crisis. Leveraging linguistic analysis, topic modelling, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis, startup data was analyzed to identify overarching trends in startup launch campaigns across years. Specifically, this work identifies emerging trends in the Kickstarter market in 2020 to understand how external factors affect launch practices. Subtle yet significant changes in Kickstarter campaigns show that new clusters of campaigns emerged during 2020, not present in prior years, indicating that product developers adapted language to meet the needs of a changing market. Findings motivate a more thorough investigation of the relationships between startup market trends and external events to build a deeper understanding of the fundamental ways developers adapt design processes due to external stimuli.
AB - Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter provide new product developers with a novel and readily accessible platform to interact with potential customers, seek funding, and gain valuable feedback from target users. Successful startup design processes are often praised due to startups’ agility and ability to adapt to changing markets under extreme resource constraints. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the market in a number of significant ways, and publicly available data on Kickstarter provides valuable insight into the fundamental ways that product developers adapt to volatiles markets created by a global crisis. Leveraging linguistic analysis, topic modelling, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis, startup data was analyzed to identify overarching trends in startup launch campaigns across years. Specifically, this work identifies emerging trends in the Kickstarter market in 2020 to understand how external factors affect launch practices. Subtle yet significant changes in Kickstarter campaigns show that new clusters of campaigns emerged during 2020, not present in prior years, indicating that product developers adapted language to meet the needs of a changing market. Findings motivate a more thorough investigation of the relationships between startup market trends and external events to build a deeper understanding of the fundamental ways developers adapt design processes due to external stimuli.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120000153&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85120000153&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1115/DETC2021-71798
DO - 10.1115/DETC2021-71798
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85120000153
T3 - Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
BT - 33rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM)
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
Y2 - 17 August 2021 through 19 August 2021
ER -