Innovation through pertinent patents research based on physical phenomena involved

One can find innovative solutions to complex industrial problems by looking for knowledge in patents. Traditional search using keywords in databases of patents has been widely used. Currently, different computational methods that limit human intervention have been developed. We aim to define a method to improve the search for relevant patents in order to solve industrial problems and specifically to deduce evolution opportunities. The non-automatic, semi-automatic, and automatic search methods use keywords. For a detailed keyword search, we propose as a basis the functional decomposition and the analysis of the physical phenomena involved in the achievement of the function to fulfill. The search for solutions to design a bi-phasic separator in deep offshore shows the method presented in this paper

ARIZ85 and patent-driven knowledge support

AbstractThe growing complexity of technical solutions, which encompass knowledge from different scientific fields, makes necessary, also for multi-disciplinary working teams, the consultation of information sources. Indeed, tacit knowledge is essential, but often not sufficient to achieve a proficient problem solving process. Besides, the most comprehensive tool of the TRIZ body of knowledge, i.e. ARIZ, requires, more or less explicitly, the retrieval of new knowledge in order to entirely exploit its potential to drive towards valuable solutions.A multitude of contributions from the literature support various common tasks encountered when using TRIZ and requiring additional information; most of them hold the objective of speeding up the generation of inventive solutions thanks to the capabilities of text mining techniques. Nevertheless, no global study has been conducted to fully disclose the effective knowledge requirements of ARIZ. With respect to this deficiency, the present paper illustrates an analysis of the algorithm with the specific objective of identifying the different types of information needs that can be satisfied by patents. The results of the investigation lay bare the most significant gaps of the research in the field. Further on, an initial proposal is advanced to structure the retrieval of relevant information from patent sources currently not supported by existing methodologies and software applications, so as to exploit the vast amount of technical knowledge contained in there. An illustrative experiment sheds light on the relevance of control parameters as input terms for the definition of search queries aimed at retrieving patents sharing the same physical contradiction of the problem to be treated

Patent data driven innovation logic

Innovation research is conventionally conducted with creativity techniques such as TRIZ, Mind Mapping, Brainstorming, etc. (Dewulf, Baillie 1998). Patent research is typically used to research novelty or prior art, and legal studies. This thesis is at the intersection of creativity techniques, and patent data analysis. It describes how to utilise patent data for distilling Innovation Logic and conducting innovation research. Using the patent research tool PatentInspiration (© AULIVE Software NV), the 4 different stages of the Innovation Logic approach have been subjected to text analysis in patent literature. The specific text patterns were identified and documented on several case studies, with one case study across the whole thesis: the toothbrush. The opportunities and limitations of Patent Data Driven Innovation Research have been documented and discussed. This methodology has been demonstrated within a proposed structural approach to problem solving, technology marketing and innovation research. Furthermore, the potential of artificial idea generation and artificial creativity was examined and debated for the purpose of computer aided creativity. This thesis examines and confirms three claims: CLAIM 1: PROPERTIES AND FUNCTIONS CAN BE ADJECTIVES AND VERBS IN PATENT LITERATURE CLAIM 2: PATENT DATA ANALYSIS AUGMENTS THE FULL INNOVATION LOGIC PROCESS CLAIM 3: ARTIFICIAL INNOVATION METHODS CAN BE FUELED BY PATENT DATA Patent data can be text mined, acting as a global brain consisting of over 100 million invention documents. It is possible to use this existing data to reverse engineer thinking methodologies, allowing scientists and engineers to solve new problems, invent new products or processes, or find new markets for existing technologies. Patent Data Driven Innovation Logic will demonstrate a systematic innovation approach that combines the force of contemporary data mining methods on patent literature, with a structured innovation research methodology.Open Acces

Using Patent Information for Identification of New Product Features with High Market Potential

AbstractThe current situation in planning and executing of innovation projects within industrial companies still contains considerable drawbacks such as the lack of the tools for systematic task definition for short to long term innovation or low reliability of market success prediction for new product concepts in the early stages of innovation process. Despite the best efforts to reduce risk of failures, the majority of all industrial innovation initiatives offers only incremental improvements compared to the products on the market. The attempts to incorporate customers into new product development require time-expensive customer interviews or extensive field research and seldom deliver significant competitive advantages. The paper discusses the possibilities of fast systematic identification of underserved customer needs, innovation tasks and new product features based on the internal competences of companies, on the analysis of the patent databases and the verification through market tests. The new approach focuses on identification and evaluation of customer needs, understood as solution-neutral benefits, which are expected by the customers. It proposes to enhance the function and contradiction analysis of technical systems and the analysis of the customer working process with the identification of customer benefits obtained from the patent databases. Similar customers’ working processes in various industrial sectors often have different levels of technical and technological evolution. This fact gives the opportunity to identify and to transfer customer needs known in one sector to another sector where these needs are still latent. Using patent information makes the customer needs transfer feasible and manageable

Natural Language Processing (NLP) – A Solution for Knowledge Extraction from Patent Unstructured Data

AbstractPatents are valuable source of knowledge and are extremely important for assisting engineers and decisions makers through the inventive process. This paper describes a new approach of automatic extraction of IDM (Inventive Design Method) related knowledge from patent documents. IDM derives from TRIZ, the theory of Inventive problem solving, which is largely based on patent's observation to theorize the act of inventing. Our method mainly consists in using natural language techniques (NLP) to match and extract knowledge relevant to IDM Ontology. The purpose of this paper is to investigate on the contribution of NLP techniques to effective knowledge extraction from patent documents. We propose in this paper to firstly report on progress made so far in data mining before describing our approach

TeknoAssistant : a domain specific tech mining approach for technical problem-solving support

This paper presents TeknoAssistant, a domain-specific tech mining method for building a problem-solution conceptual network aimed at helping technicians from a particular field to find alternative tools and pathways to implement when confronted with a problem. We evaluate our approach using Natural Language Processing field, and propose a 2-g text mining process adapted for analyzing scientific publications. We rely on a combination of custom indicators with Stanford OpenIE SAO extractor to build a Bernoulli Naive Bayes classifier which is trained by using domain-specific vocabulary provided by the TeknoAssistant user. The 2-g contained in the abstracts of a scientific publication dataset are classified in either "problem", "solution" or "none" categories, and a problem-solution network is built, based on the co-occurrence of problems and solutions in the abstracts. We propose a combination of clustering technique, visualization and Social Network Analysis indicators for guiding a hypothetical user in a domain-specific problem solving process

Function Based Design-by-Analogy: A Functional Vector Approach to Analogical Search

Design-by-analogy is a powerful approach to augment traditional concept generation methods by expanding the set of generated ideas using similarity relationships from solutions to analogous problems. While the concept of design-by-analogy has been known for some time, few actual methods and tools exist to assist designers in systematically seeking and identifying analogies from general data sources, databases, or repositories, such as patent databases. A new method for extracting functional analogies from data sources has been developed to provide this capability, here based on a functional basis rather than form or conflict descriptions. Building on past research, we utilize a functional vector space model (VSM) to quantify analogous similarity of an idea's functionality. We quantitatively evaluate the functional similarity between represented design problems and, in this case, patent descriptions of products. We also develop document parsing algorithms to reduce text descriptions of the data sources down to the key functions, for use in the functional similarity analysis and functional vector space modeling. To do this, we apply Zipf's law on word count order reduction to reduce the words within the documents down to the applicable functionally critical terms, thus providing a mapping process for function based search. The reduction of a document into functional analogous words enables the matching to novel ideas that are functionally similar, which can be customized various ways. This approach thereby provides relevant sources of design-by-analogy inspiration. As a verification of the approach, two original design problem case studies illustrate the distance range of analogical solutions that can be extracted. This range extends from very near-field, literal solutions to far-field cross-domain analogies.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CMMI-0855326)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CMMI-0855510)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CMMI-0855293)SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC

TRIZ to invent your future utilizing directed evolution methodology

AbstractThis paper explains the concept of Directed Evolution. This concept is based on the s-curve, patterns of evolution, a structured work process and instruments. These elements are described in this article and examples of conducted work are given