A New Comprehensive Patent Analysis Approach for New Product Design in Mechanical Engineering

This study proposes a five-phase procedure for a new product design process. Based on the concept of focus first, then extend, this study presents a new approach called the New Comprehensive Patent Analysis model (NCPA) which combines the patent family with patent citation analysis in a new product design process. The procedure includes the following features: (1) integrating the perspective of management-based and technology-based design for patent searching, (2) building a patent family based on industry basic patents, (3) filtering the patent family to obtain key patents, (4) utilizing patent citations to gain necessary technology information in product development design, and (5) combining TRIZ theory to construct patent technology performance maps, and to discover product niches. This NCPA model is empirically applied in a real case. The results show that the NCPA improves the overall efficiency of new product designs, but also involves higher cost than other approaches. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.