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

Measuring the Efficiency of Inventive Activities Along Inventive Projects in R&D

AbstractMeasuring the efficiency of inventive design is the first research step to determine the key indicators of inventive efficiency. Detecting measurement objects, parameters, and the impacts factors that involve with inventive design processes provides us toward founding an effective measurement. The article looks for the appropriate zone across organizational processes for measuring inventive efficiency and mapping criteria. It aims to clear the principal criteria of measuring inventive efficiency, and demonstrates the necessity of a pertinent selection for entry factors to define indicators. This research is fed by an inquiry of about 100 French companies with their R&Ds

On contradiction clouds

AbstractOur proposal, through this article, addresses the issue of obtaining, representing and selecting the appropriate subset of contradictions among a complete set of contradictions resulting from an initial situation framing within a specific domain. This contribution has to be understood within the Inventive Design context since most of its grounding relies on the fact that any problem can be formulated as a contradiction (in the sense of TRIZ). By proposing the concept of “contradiction cloud” as three value graphical representation of a set of elementary contradictions, we claim that designers considerably reduce the fuzziness of a contradiction choice prior entering in a solving phase in Inventive Design processes. The modes of interpretation of this cloud will be also presented. The impact of this new element in the teaching of TRIZ was tested both in educational situations within the framework of our engineering curriculum and in several industrial partnerships. A discussion section will then highlight the assets, the limits and the perspectives of our contribution

Case-based Reasoning for Knowledge Capitalization in Inventive Design Using Latent Semantic Analysis

International audienceNowadays, innovation represents one of the most crucial factors driving the success of companies. The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (also known as TRIZ) is a well-established method to facilitate systematic inventive design. Although, TRIZ allows solving inventive problems through a panoply of knowledge sources, it may make inventive problem solving a time-consuming, experience demanding process and lead to waste of resources of the companies. To avoid the use of these tools and to help new users in solving their inventive problems without completely mastering TRIZ, we propose in this paper an approach based on the use of the Case-based reasoning (CBR) in order to capitalize experience. CBR is a knowledge paradigm that solves a new problem by finding the old similar cases and reusing them. The retrieval is conducted in order to find the old similar cases, and the old solutions of the retrieved cases are adapted to solve the new problem. In this paper, a systematic three-level adaptation is proposed to reduce the effort required of the users in choosing the suitable solution to solve their problem. An example is used to illustrate in detail the proposed approach

An Approach to Identify the Readiness Level of a Solution Concept in the Inventive Design Method

It is generally known that the ranking of ideas during creative sessions creates two majors problems. The first is to undervalue a promising idea and thus wash away business priorities. The second is to overstate a false good idea that will be the underlying cause of unnecessary expenses. Although the subject of ranking ideas is spread and common in studies and research, it still poses an obvious contradiction: the level of definition of an idea must be precise to secure investments and imprecise to preserve its innovative role. In our research on this topic, we endeavored to highlight a new path that would both simplify engineers access to formal calculation (such as to give credibility to an idea by removing the blur surrounding it) while preserving potential inventive margins by identifying for each concept its degree of feasibility. However, this second part was not clearly defined in our research. In this paper, we present a complementary aspect of our approach. Its underlying idea is to associate each index to a TRL (Technical Readiness Level) that is likely to assess in an objective and formal way its maturity with a recognized scale in industrial environments. A case study and a discussion of the results of the contribution will be discussed at the end of the paper

TRIZ – The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

International audienceThe work presented here is generally intended for engineers, educators at all levels, industrialists, managers, researchers and political representatives. Offering a snapshot of various types of research conducted within the field of TRIZ in France, it represents a unique resource. ​It has been two decades since the TRIZ theory originating in Russia spread across the world. Every continent adopted it in a different manner – sometimes by glorifying its potential and its perspectives (the American way); sometimes by viewing it with mistrust and suspicion (the European way); and sometimes by adopting it as-is, without questioning it further (the Asian way). However, none of these models of adoption truly succeeded. Today, an assessment of TRIZ practices in education, industry and research is necessary. TRIZ has expanded to many different scientific disciplines and has allowed young researchers to reexamine the state of research in their field. To this end, a call was sent out to all known francophone research laboratories producing regular research about TRIZ. Eleven of them agreed to send one or more of their postdoctoral researchers to present their work during a seminar, regardless of the maturity or completeness of their efforts. It was followed by this book project, presenting one chapter for every current thesis in order to reveal the breadth, the richness and the perspectives that research about the TRIZ theory could offer our society. The topics dealt with e.g. the development of new methods inspired by TRIZ, educational practices, and measuring team impact