Patent stimuli search and its influence on ideation outcomes

Abstract

Prior studies on design ideation have demonstrated the efficacy of using patents as stimuli for concept generation. However, the following questions remain: (a) From which part of the large patent database can designers identify stimuli? (b) What are their implications on ideation outcomes? This research aims to answer these questions through a design experiment of searching and identifying patent stimuli to generate new concepts of spherical rolling robots. We position the identified patent stimuli in the home, near and far fields defined in the network of patent technology classes, according to the network's community structure and the knowledge proximity of the stimuli to the spherical rolling robot design. Significant findings are: designers are most likely to find patent stimuli in the home field, whereas most patent stimuli are identified in the near field; near-field patents stimulate the most concepts, which exhibit a higher average novelty; combined home-and far-field stimuli are most beneficial for high concept quality. These findings offer insights on designers' preferences in search for patent stimuli and the influence of stimulation distance on ideation outcomes. The findings will also help guide the development of a computational tool for the search of patents for design inspiration.

Idea generation with Technology Semantic Network

“…According to the extensive design creativity literature (Gentner and Markman, 1997;Ward, 1998;Christensen and Schunn, 2007;Tseng et al, 2008;Chan et al, 2011Fu et al, 2013b;Song et al, 2017a;Srinivasan et al, 2018), near stimuli to the target design domain can stimulate more ideas and more feasible ideas (Gick and Holyoak, 1980;Weisberg, 2006;Fu et al, 2013b;Keshwani and Chakrabarti, 2017;Srinivasan et al, 2018), whereas far stimuli may stimulate fewer ideas and ideas with high infeasibility and abstractness, but give rise to the novelty of the generated ideas (Gentner and Markman, 1997;Ward, 1998;Tseng et al, 2008;Srinivasan et al, 2018). Therefore, when searching and choosing white space concepts as potential design stimuli, one may focus on the near-field concepts with high R values (e.g., ZR > 0) for ideation productivity, but anticipate common and non-surprising ideas.…”

“…To inspire design ideation, various data-driven methods and software tools have been introduced to explore and retrieve design precedents (patents, documents, etc.) and utilize them as design stimuli (Murphy et al, 2014;Song et al, 2017a). In general, the design stimuli have been retrieved as documents within a limited scope of specific domains.…”

Data-Driven Design in Concept Development: Systematic Review and Missed Opportunities

“…The latter method of analysis is also used by Wodehouse et al (2018) on a database of patents. Similarly, Song et al (2017) and Venkataraman et al (2017) applied network analysis on patens databases to be used as stimuli on concept ideation. Finally, Ahmed and Fuge (2018) also applied bisociative information networks on an online database of ideas to foster concept generation.…”

Exploring the Application of Network Analytics in Characterizing a Conceptual Design Space

“…Network theory has also been applied to understand ideation strategies and design creativity. Song et al, map a patent space into home, near, and far fields, based on knowledge distance, to a particular design task The researchers examine how participants utilize patents from these varying fields as stimuli for ideation, and how these stimuli affect problem-solving outcome (Song, Srinivasan, et al, 2017a). In addition, Ahmed et al, create bisociative information networks to uncover cross-domain inspiration and creativity .…”