Systematic innovation through patent based product aspect analysis

Patent repositories are considered as a state of the art in innovation efforts for specific product categories. Using text mining techniques on selected word categories in such repositories, complemented by a dimensional reduction method, generic product aspects are identified, allowing systematic quantification of the development state of product categories. The derived product profiles are applied for systematic identification of product categories that can contribute to the further development of selected product aspects for a product of interest. The effectiveness of this methodology was experimentally validated, demonstrating the significance of the proposed design-by-analogy approach based on the described product aspect analysis. © 2011 CIRP.status: publishe