Originally Posted by
Revoltingest
Kickstarter projects all look pretty risky to me. A company goes there because it lacks the financial wherewithal to finance its own development project. Even when I worked on new products for large companies with plenty of money, most of what I designed was unsuccessful in the marketplace. Failure is the norm for radically new products, especially with new companies. (The only thing I ever worked on that anyone would know of is the F-18 airplane. But even there, the mechanical flight controls I worked on were soon replaced with electrics.) So Kickstarter money should be treated as gambling or charitable donation.
I fully agree with this, it is always very risky to innovate, most innovation aren't commercial success, only one fully new product I worked on during my whole research engineer carrier was a huge success that generate a lot of money.
And I also agree about Kickstarter.
When it is used by established companies who have enough funds and development capacity to bring new products to the market, it is a manner to let others take the financial risks without any real reward (the supposed discount for backers isn't a high enough reward seen the level of risk) if it is successful, the company takes the reward if any, the backers take the risks !
When it is used by an individual inventor, the risk to fail due to lack of knowledge, development capacity and manufacturing capacity is very high. Failure can come in the form of no delivery at all or delivery of something unusable or different than what was promised or not reliable in the long term.