Kickstarter Launches Now Provides Live Stats on Project Success

Kickstarter was talked about a lot in Spring's Emerging Technologies course.  While Sourceforge helped play a major role in open source software entrepreneurship, Kickstarter is covering a much wider range.  As an organizer of the PICMET conference, I was really impressed with the conference that they are funding using Kickstarter.  What a novel idea that all the all registrations are being done through Kickstarter.

While we talked about interesting  Kickstarter projects in the class, I really missed data that Sourceforge provides on projects, their activities, and success.

Fortunately, Kickstarter has just opened up a stats web page with a lot of this information.  The data is still at the aggregate level but this should prompt a lot of interesting new product development research over the next few years in the same way as Sourceforge has.

While Kickstarter is getting a lot of attention and publicity, I'm also very interested in what Quirky is doing.  If you haven't heard of them, Kickstarter projects are generally pretty mature - prototypes have been tested and now they are getting ready for full production.  In contrast, Quirky helps take ideas from the earliest, raw idea stage.  

Kickstarter, Quirky, and others are broadening the ability for everyone to get involved in New Product Development.  If you have a great idea, you can now do something about it.   Now there is opportunity to mine these sources for data to test ideas and I expect that we will be seeing research papers coming out using this data over the next few years.