TRIZ-based Patent Design Around for Enterprises: A Pencil Extender Device Innovative Redesign

Patent design around is crucial to the enterprise's product design and technology innovation. The patent-around innovative design method based on TRIZ is proposed, using function analysis to analyze the existed patent, providing the process and method for the enterprise’s in-depth analysis of patent documents by standing in the patent-around perspective. Combining the around strategies and TRIZ problem-solving tools, it finds out the relationship between them, thus provides guidance for enterprises’ technical personnel and designers to utilize suitable TRIZ problem-solving tools to solve the problem that arose after using the patent around strategies, to design a new product which is different to the existed patent. The proposed method may help small and medium enterprises, especially those who are not familiar with TRIZ theory, to utilize TRIZ theory effectively for patent-around and product innovation design. Finally, the method has been tested and verified successfully by a case of a pencil extender device. In this case, the patent around strategy of deletion and substitution method is used, then corresponding TRIZ problem-solving tools, contradiction matrix and knowledge-effect database are applied to solve the problems. Thus a new design around product which is more convenient is gotten. Keywords—TRIZ; patent design around; pencil extender device; innovative design