Comparative study of technological trend between DAIKIN and Panasonic in the field of air conditioner

This research focuses on patent applications filled in Japan, in the business field of air conditioner for home use. In spite of the saturated Japanese market, only two companies, DAIKIN INDUSTRIES, LTD and Panasonic Corporation, have been increasing domestic market share of air conditioner in recent years. In this study, we visualized technical purposes as a system diagram. We made a comparative evaluation on the difference of technical strength of these two companies. Moreover, we evaluated the correlations between the number of patent applications of each company and the score of consumer needs collected by questionnaire survey. We surveyed how each company applies for patent applications for consumer needs by monitoring and tried to propose a new concept for evaluation patent portfolio, we believe that the patent portfolio should have a proper matching with the consumer needs portfolio.