Linus Wretblad, CEO
IPscreener is an AI-based screening technology specializing in world-wide patent data. The tool finds relevant documents and helps to interpret them. The technology enables anyone to validate ideas in the innovation process.
“More than 80 percent of all tech knowledge is hidden in patent documents, and 90 percent of these are legally free to use,” said Linus Wretblad, CEO at IPscreener.
The problem is that this information is written in legal language, needing special expertise and experience both to explore via complex search strategies but also to read and understand. This inspired Wretblad and his team to build a tool that can support anyone to extract knowledge from patents and also assist in interpreting the information.
In early 2000, Wretblad worked as an innovation advisor, providing assessments on the innovation landscape. He noticed that a significant number of his clients were reinventing the wheel, spending valuable efforts building concepts that someone had already explored solutions for. The pre-existing information hidden in patents did not get explored until late in the process. Had it been done in the beginning, time and money would have been saved, and the innovators could have started working at the edge of existing development.
“This sparked the idea, to make it possible to easily find and interpret relevant information hidden in existing patens,” said Wretblad.
A research project was approved by Eurostar, and together with researchers at the University of Vienna, Linus Wretblad and his team created the prototype to what is now IPscreener. In 2017, they were selected to work with UCLA. In 2018, they won a scholarship to the TINC program at the Nordic Innovation House in Palo Alto. They also got selected to the Innovate 46 program in New York.
“I am grateful that so many people along the way have believed in our product. That they have understood its potential in saving time, decreasing costs, and increasing quality.”
IPscreener will automatically, from a simple descriptive text, present a dashboard of the prior art situation with an, according to Wretblad, outstanding precision.
“One main advantage is that one does not have to be a search expert nor familiar with the legal terminology.”
Wretblad also stresses that the tool does not only provide the relevant documents; it also identifies the most pertinent text passages.
“Finding a relevant patent document is only the first part. Understanding why it is relevant, and identifying those pages is often an even greater challenge, which becomes much easier with our solution.”
The A.I. based screening tool is also self-adapting as well as easily integrated with existing internal innovation systems for seamless user experience. It can be dynamically adjusted and optimized to a company’s specific technical area.
“Approximately 50 percent of all innovations that lead to a patent application is rejected because their claim is partially or completely covered by the already existing prior art. The key is to find and understand the knowledge hidden in pre-existing patents, and to do this early in the innovation process.”
As a member of SACC, Wretblad and IP Screener would like to contribute both with knowledge and support to raise this awareness for Swedish as well as U.S. entities.
