SUMMER 2021

Company: Rouse

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Time period: 9 weeks during June through August

My name is Zaid Saeed and I am eager to give you a brief insight into my latest summer internship in Stockholm at Rouse. I am currently studying my second year of master’s studies at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, and I was looking to sharpen my skills within Intellectual Capital Management and Business Development, here is how the story goes:

I was both excited and relieved when I first saw that I had received a job offer from Rouse. Of all the interesting companies that were part of this internship programme, Rouse resonated a bit more with my interests and skills. Rouse is an IP consultancy business focused on emerging markets and provide a full range of intellectual property services. They have a long- standing experience and relationships in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and their services range from patent and trademark protection and management to commercialization, global enforcement, and anti-counterfeiting. Their consultancy specializes in providing strategic and multidisciplinary consulting services to technology companies and brand owners globally. What I was particularly fond of is their vision of putting intellectual property in the core of business to become one of the main value drivers. Almost all businesses rely on intellectual property to maintain competitiveness, may it be as trade secrets or patents and copyrights. To make a successful expansion, one need to consider the many cross-bordered regulations and agreements. The process is usually quite regulated and require expert advice, which is partly where Rouse operates.

Having worked in China and studied in Singapore, I have developed a certain interest in the Asian market which made Rouse the perfect candidate. Additionally, my newfound interest for intellectual capital management as well as my curiosity in being a management consultant further reassured me that Rouse was the place to be during my summer of 2021. I can without a doubt say that Rouse lived up to every bit of my expectations and even exceeded them. Not only did my supervisors Holly White and Nigel Wong tailor the internship based on my areas of competence and interests, but they also made certain that I was constantly experiencing personal development by presenting me with new challenges. The company culture was very welcoming and familiar. My mentor Holly gave me a proper introduction to many relevant actors in the business, in spite the fact that it is quite a large organization. I got to work in multi-disciplinary teams, both ethnically and skills wise, on global projects for leading actors in a variety of industries.

Throughout the internship I was constantly reminded of the value in our CIP-programme. The level of respect and gratitude that were shown to the models and methods used in our learning was very gratifying. The intellectual asset mapping framework, deguncification- based way of