Abstract. Inspiration is an important way to stimulate product innovation design. To trigger the inspiration of creative design for designers, a new method of triggering design inspiration by biomimetic product patents is presented. First, a particularly useful and efficient method, namely method of semantic associated expansion, is presented to obtain associated biomimetic product patents. Then the method of recognition and extracting inspiration factor from obtained biomimetic product patents is proposed, the process model is established to stimulate design inspiration. Finally, the proposed methods and models are practiced by the creative design of the underwater diamond wire saw machine. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective.