SUMMER 2022

Company: Volvo Group

Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Hi everyone! We are (from left to right) Alexander Danielsson, Anton Stjernholm Börjesson, and Andrej Krsteski – three students at the Entrepreneurship and Business Design master’s at Chalmers University of Technology. During the summer, we worked at Volvo Group Intellectual Property’s Strategy & Portfolio department, with a project that brought more responsibilities and provided a far larger impact than we had anticipated. We want to share a couple of words about our experience and the learnings we had from it.

Volvo Group is a producer of trucks, marine engines, buses, and construction equipment, employing almost 100,000 people across 190 markets.

Our task was to perform a patent portfolio analysis, by mapping all newly developed technologies which are to enter one of Volvo Truck’s electric trucks. By the end of it, we were expected to provide thorough documentation of our findings, along with multiple presentations held for employees of interest. Although being handed a large task, we were left with large autonomy in our work, and were thus able treating this as our own-lead project! This allowed us to find our own way throughout the weeks, be creative, and put our own touch on the task at hand. Working on projects during the first year of our master’s studies definitely helped us perform our work during the summer, and the time at Volvo Group IP provided further learnings in leading and executing an IP related project within a large corporation.

Reflecting on our contributions, we are very pleased with what we accomplished. Our division was impressed with what we had produced, and the material will be received and evaluated by highly seated executives within the company. We are delighted to have enrolled in Entrepreneurship and Business Design, as it allowed us to acquire fundamental knowledge about IP and entrepreneurship, which proved to be helpful during our internship. Furthermore, being given the opportunity to produce something that is of major importance to Volvo Group as an intern is something we are very thankful to CIP for.