A PATENT CLAIM TRANSFORMING FRAMEWORK: DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVE FUNCTIONAL CONCEPTS IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

A-DEWS 2016 - Innovation of Life in Asia - Asian Design Engineering Workshop

Year: 2016
Editor: Umeda, Y.; Nomaguchi, Y.; Koga, T.; Kishita, Y.
Author: Lee, Baek-Young; Hong, Yoo S.
Institution: Seoul National University, Korea
Section: Creative Design
Page(s): 009-017

Abstract

Every patent contains creative ideas of inventors. Creative ideas can be used to make new products more competitive. However, only few company positively use patents as an idea pool. To make claims in a patent specification, inventors should follow specific grammars because claims are the bases for legal judgements. For people who are not accustomed to patent claim grammars, unfamiliar patent claim grammars hinder the extraction of creative ideas from patents. Even if patent specialists are involved in a new product development project, time and human resources invested to analyze patent become burden. Function structure diagram is a method to express a system by elements and relationships. Functions structure diagram is intuitive and compatible, so it can be used as a communication platform in a new product development project. In this paper, we propose a new framework for transforming patent claims to function structure diagrams. This framework decomposes a patent claim into elements and their relationships and to represent them into a diagram of boxes and arrows. The proposed framework can assist patent specialists in extracting ideas from patents and can be used as a tool when communicating with other people who want use patent as an idea pool.

Keywords: Patent specification, Claim, Product development, Concept generation, Function structure diagram