In each issue of Swedish Chamber Insights, readers will have the opportunity to get to know one of our members better. This month, we spoke with Linus Wretblad, CEO & Founder of IPscreener, to learn more about their innovative work in making patent knowledge accessible and future ambitions as members of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce.
For those who are new to IP Screener, could you provide a brief introduction to the company and its services?
Are you inventing or re-inventing? That is the question. IPscreener is your best tool to address this. Why is this so important? Because more than half of all innovation projects across the world are reinventing already known concepts. And normally, this is discovered very late in the innovation cycle because such information is hidden in patents, which are too obscure to find, explore, and interpret without special expertise, and thus, are often ignored.
We use AI to assist and democratize access to the patent knowledge base, enabling everyone to explore, understand, and benefit from the information hidden in these complex documents. From a short descriptive text, the tool instantly establishes an overview of the closest solutions, including AI-assisted reading and analysis to support both review, collaboration, and follow-up on results.
The company IPscreener was established in 2018 as a start-up originating from a European-funded Eurostar project. Today, the company has validated more than 30,000 innovation ideas across the globe via its SaaS web solution, with clients ranging from large corporations such as Novartis and Ericsson to start-ups, SMEs, and Technology Transfer Offices.
Could you walk us through a concrete example of how IP Screener’s tool has helped a client uncover unexpected insights or opportunities in their field of innovation?
A typical scenario: A start-up company was building miniaturized sensors for various measurements, such as heat, range, and environmental applications. They were completely confident that they had a unique approach, and they had a completed prototype ready to join an accelerator program.
They basically only wanted to scale and had no interest in IP whatsoever, claiming to be faster and smarter than their competitors. During the engagement step, they had a workshop and had to run their problem-solution-purpose one-pager into IPscreener. Instantly, they were presented with a few hits showing a text passage of a patent document revealing a smarter and more robust solution than the one being suggested. This created a lot of confusion and anxiety in the team about what to do, until they understood that this document was no longer legally active and they could simply “take it” and use this better solution to improve their own product. The global company that had filed the outdated patent later showed interest in a venture partnership. The landscape analysis provided by IPscreener also showed two new countries with a lot of potential activity in the field, which later proved to be good markets for the start-up. In addition, a master inventor in the field was found and became interested in engaging in a collaboration. All this information on the global innovation landscape was gathered and reviewed in less than 30 minutes. This user case shows how an easy IPscreener analysis caters to both core know-how and business intelligence.
What specific challenges in innovation idea validation does IP Screener’s semantic AI technology observe, and how does this impact the early stages of product development for businesses?
The greatest challenge is actually the knowledge gap: making people actually do this research exercise. Most people are completely oblivious to the fact that more than 80% of all tech knowledge is hidden in patent documents, with 90% of it being free to use, as it is no longer in force.
The common scenario is simply looking at research papers and then getting going with solving things. This is the key mistake, as it implies a high risk of re-inventing or becoming dependent on other players’ IP rights by ignoring development trends elsewhere. It is important to make people aware that the patent information library is the greatest source of technology know-how on Earth. It is a change management challenge to show that there are now opportunities, through IPscreener, to conduct such a screening study on your own during the ideation stage—even for small entities—and to integrate learnings from this information source during development.
The other major challenge is making patent documents accessible and understandable for everyone. They are long texts written in a legal style, using complex words that are often repeated. Sometimes, even for experts, it takes longer to assess the relevance of a document than to actually find it. IPscreener uses AI to map and identify specific text passages, summarise, and present core content using simpler wording, enabling faster reading. This is key to transforming the knowledge from hidden to accessible for non-experts.
What upcoming events in the Swedish Chamber calendar are you most excited to attend, or perhaps organize, and who do you hope to meet there?
I really look forward to both attending and contributing to the upcoming “Sustainability & Innovation Summit.” I will focus strongly on teaching a broader scope of the DSG 9 chapter, “Sustainable Innovation,” to also address re-invention. Regardless of how admirable a clean tech topic may be for development, it will never be sustainable if you spend resources remaking and rediscovering what has already been done elsewhere. It will be a great day filled with inspiring topics and engaged presenters.
The key to smart, efficient innovation is to find and understand essential knowledge early in the innovation process. We hope to meet with R&D managers and entrepreneurs to deepen their knowledge on this topic.
Connect with IPscreener by connecting with them on LinkedIn!
Do you want to get to know more Swedish Chamber members? Read about team5pm, Validata, and Polestar.
