Computerized innovation inspired by existing patents

This research is to make and realize an idea for computerized innovation, the idea integrating surveying patent information, reappearing problem and discovering breakthrough into design-around. Many experts made their efforts to develop variant approaches to analyze the patent information; however, those approaches could not provide effective clues to real innovation. The authors consider that the most perplexing problem during innovative thinking is to find the genuine problem of objective design; therefore, the proposed idea introducing a keyword recognition approach based on a specific keyword bank and its corresponding TRIZ parameters/inventive principles, is conducive to finding that problem in related patents. After finding the problem by analogizing the patents through using the keyword bank, a scenario of the problem could be more clearly and new candidates of solution could be reached through the TRIZ contradiction matrix, and then those candidates would be beneficial to innovation. This research constructs a computerized tool “SDAL (Smart Design-Around Tool)” for realizing the proposed idea, and it could assist designers to inspire new ideas for their innovation thinking. So far the test database of the SDAL only involves the Taiwanese patent information related to the “Assisting-Rising-Movements-Chair for Elder and Lower-Limb Challenged”.