Discovering emerging business ideas based on crowdfunded software projects

User-centered innovation has attracted considerable interest for exploiting emerging business ideas. We suggest a novel framework for discovering emerging business ideas and their combination with user-centered innovation in the software industry based on design thinking processes. We apply topic modeling to projects on Kickstarter which is one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world. We adopt conjoint analysis to find which topics are most preferred upon the platform in terms of the amount of funding that they have received. From our findings, the convergence of smart assistant services with various domains, such as tutoring mathematics and seeking job opportunities, is recommended as an emerging idea for software businesses. We also find that the ideas preferred in the US are different from those preferred in other countries. Our findings can be exploited effectively for decision support in establishing a new business model. Finally, this study contributes to discovering emerging business ideas by connecting user-centered innovation with a design thinking perspective.