Research On Strategy Of Design Around Patent

The communication of economy and commerce between China and the world is coming more and more after China become one member of the WTO, and increasing big corporations abroad are setting up their branches all over China. Against the strong power, the large capital and the mature brand of foreign corporations, how do the Chinese corporations resist them and fight back to them? This is the question that many Chinese corporations must think about. The foreign corporations use the possession of technologies-patents to suppress the products made in China, and use all kinds of laws about patents to suppress Chinese corporations. Facing these problems, Chinese corporations can not blench any longer, and must take use of some necessary patent strategies to resist the aggression of patent of foreign corporations. Design around patent is one part of the patent strategy of corporations, and is a means of using others' patents but not encroaching them. Considering the situation of Chinese corporations right now, design around patent is a positive patent strategy.The studies about design around patent are not so many, and most of them only have the simple introduction of methods but do not form a detailed flow of design around patent. So, it is necessary to analyze and summarize these methods, and introduce the application of them, which can make the corporations handy when they use these methods. Then we involved the design around patent into the flow of product design to make the process of product innovation including design around patent more intuitionistic.The first chapter of this paper analyzed the background of the study and the correlative researches. The second chapter told us the research methods and divided the study about strategy of design around patent to two parts-the patent for invention or utility model and the patent for appearance. The third chapter analyzed the flow of product design involving design around patent. First, we introduced the traditional flow of product design. Then we analyzed the flow of design around patent, including the flow of design around the patent for invention or utility model and the flow of design around the patent for appearance. And last, we can obtain the flow of product design involving design around patent. The fourth chapter used a practical example to prove the rationality and feasibility of the flow of design around the patent for appearance. Finally, we conclude this thesis and discuss some directions for future work.