Information extracted from patents as creative stimuli for product innovation

DS 87-6 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 17) Vol 6: Design Information and Knowledge, Vancouver, Canada, 21-25.08.2017

Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Parvin, Mehdi; Cascini, Gaetano; Becattini, Niccolo
Series: ICED
Institution: Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Section: Design Information and Knowledge
Page(s): 297-306
ISBN: 978-1-904670-94-0
ISSN: 2220-4342

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of information extracted from patents on the creative performance of R&D engineers involved in new product design tasks. The creative stimuli originated by domain specific patent sources are proposed in the form of problem-solutions maps possibly enriched with TRIZ contradiction models related to the challenges addressed by the patents. The effectiveness of this kind of creative stimuli has been checked with a two-phase experiment that involved 56 professional engineers as testers subdivided into design teams of 2 people each. The teams were initially asked to brainstorm and generate innovative ideas in the field of devices for walking support (walkers). The 28 teams were, then, exposed to 4 different treatments (7 teams each): simple brainstorming as control group, problem-solution maps with and without related TRIZ contradiction models, patent-text used as far-field sources of analogy. The results of the experiment show that the problem-solution maps alone enhance variety of generated solutions, while enriched by the TRIZ contradiction models have a higher impact on novelty despite with a smaller variety.

Keywords: Creativity, Early design phases, Conceptual design, Patents, TRIZ

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