A Study of Correlation among Product Identity Form Feature and patentability- Using Macbook Air as an example

Abstract

Over the past decades both of the economically development and the industrial maturity has urged manufactures to shift from original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to original design manufacture (ODM) and even transformed to the high value added own branding and manufacturing (OBM) level in Taiwan The tendency also arose awareness among publicity promoting to discuss the issue of product identity especially high revenue industry for 3C industries Product Identity is the core of a brand Through product identity the merchandise could stand in first line communicating the brand spirit with customers On the other hand to be high-lighten in market a well-accepted product which could be merge in product style also would be indispensable Therefore the research would aim at using Ultrabook? as examples to discuss : (1) How to generalize the product identical features which may cause the divergence of similarity and preference basing on it to design product identity? (2) how to utilize the product identity feature seeking for design patent to be used in the further design development The experiment could be separated into two stage the first stage was to research on the similarity and preference degree to the concept archetype- Macbook Air-through 36 Notebook or Ultrabook? consumers On the basis of the two dimensions the test finally dividing 18 samples into 6 groups: (1)High similarity and high preference (2)high preference and mid preference (3)mid similarity and high preference (4)mid similarity and mid preference (5)mid similarity and low preference (6)low similarity and low preference The second stage would through focus group interview which included Ultrabook? designer patent applicant and Ultrabook? consumers to find out the design feature elements and identical features of each samples In the stage the focus group finally choose 55 identical features from 124 design feature elements of each sample based on discussion about the patentability of each feature drawing the strategy of patent application for high similarity mid similarity and low similarity features Consequently the research find out the common property in each identical feature and generalize them into feature description list getting 9 feature descriptions in high similarity group 7 in mid similarity group and 2 in low similarity group Defined the suitable range to create the product identity and the corresponding the identity to patent application strategy

Date of Award	2014 Aug 9
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Heng Ho (Supervisor)