There are an incredible number of outstanding research ideas that have the potential to be commercialized and utilized, but this requires time, energy, and resources.
“Sommarmatchen’s market research was crucial for us to finally start Rove Technologies,” says Stefan Stenfelt, co-owner and originator of the LEAD company Rove Technologies.
In 2019, he participated with his idea in Sommarmatchen as he himself did not have the opportunity to investigate the conditions for creating a company around his research, and he is incredibly grateful for this today. It was there he met Emelina Mujkanovic, who has now joined Rove Technologies as CEO.
Stefan had researched a model of a human head that can simulate and precisely observe how sound is absorbed through the skull bone. The model measures vibrations in the skull bone, known as Bone Conduction, which is used, for example, to test hearing aids for people who cannot hear through the normal ear canal. Stefan’s model can help develop new products or be applied to improve sound quality in existing products.
“It started when Facebook Research Labs became interested in my research and wanted to acquire licensing rights. I then received help from LiU Invest to resolve this, and thus the core idea itself gained attention. The idea was then to test if there was interest in this solution among more companies, and that’s where Sommarmatchen came in,” says Stefan.
Sommarmatchen is an entrepreneurship program at LEAD that focuses on helping to develop ideas originating from research at Linköping University into market-adapted products and services. For five weeks, carefully selected students from LiU work on the research ideas, supported by LEAD’s experienced business coaches, to provide them with new opportunities through, for example, market analysis, mapping, or prototyping.
“What I did during Sommarmatchen was to identify interesting markets for the simulation solution, conduct analyses on how the product could be applied, and then contact companies and schedule customer meetings,” says Emelina Mujkanovic, one of the students who worked on the research idea in Sommarmatchen and is now the company’s CEO.
