Development and Application of a Patent-Based Design Around Process

This research proposes a patent-based design process by systematically integrating patent information, the rules of patent infringement judgment, strategies of designing around patents, and innovation design methodologies. The purpose of the process is to systematically generate new design concepts that are local variations of one of the concerned patents but does not infringe with existing patents. The basic idea is to consider patent infringement before engineering design concepts are actually generated. In this process, first the designer conducts standard patent analysis to identify the related patents to be designed around. Each patent is then symbolized by a “design matrix” converted from the technology/function matrix of the patent. A design-around algorithm is developed to generate a new design matrix that does not infringe with design matrices of existing patents. Then the new design matrix is transformed back into a real engineering design using the “contradiction matrix” in TRIZ. A computerized design-around tool based on the innovative patent-based design process is also developed.