整合專利家族與專利引用於新產品設計之研究

Abstract

專利家族(patent family)蘊含企業專利佈局(portfolio)的豐富資訊，專利引用(patent citation)則可以獲得專利先前技藝(prior art)，提供新產品設計之創意來源，然而過去研究未見有效整合。本研究基於「先聚焦再放大」的研究構想，提出一套整合專利家族及專利引用的新模式，可以有系統的萃取專利情報(intelligence)，提升新產品設計的效能，並植入「創意產品發展程序」(Innovative Product Development Process, IPDP)之中，包括：(1)兼具管理與技術角度進行專利檢索(patent search)。(2)選擇產業基礎專利，建構專利家族。(3)篩選專利家族，獲得關鍵性專利。(4)以專利引用追溯研發設計所需技術資訊。(5)結合TRIZ理論建構專利技術功效(technology-performance)地圖，發掘產品利基(niche)。並且以實證方式具體說明本研究方法的可行性。

A patent family comprises the information of a patent portfolio in an enterprise. While it is possible to get the information of a patent's prior art by means of patent citation analysis; however, no method has been proposed to integrated a patent family and a patent citation effectively. Based on the idea of ”focusing first, and then finding the details” which arose from this study, this report proposes a new model that combines patent family analysis with patent citation analysis into the Innovative Product Development Process (IPDP), and our research shows that the new model can indeed promote increased effectiveness of product design to extract useful patent intelligence systematically, including: (1) management based and technology based patent searching, (2) building the patent family based on an industry basic patent, (3) filtering the patent family to obtain key patents, (4) the use of patent citations to trace the necessary technology information in product design, and (5) combining TRIZ theory to build patent technology performance maps, and discover product niches. This new procedure is illustrated by applying it to a real life study.