Hej!
Today was another grey Gothenburg day. For breakfast, I had a larger parfait, fruit, a hardboiled egg, and a ginger lemon shot. I love bread, don’t get me wrong, but eating it every morning is getting a bit old. Once again, we had issues navigating to the first company of the day. Eventually everything was figured out, but it was a painful few minutes. To save some time, we even cut through the Nordstan mall connected to a walkway over the highway to get to our destination. Our first company visit today was to Valea, a patent law firm in the field of intellectual property.
At Valea, we met with Andrew, the CEO, and Victor, one of the lawyers working there. This presentation was much more entertaining and interesting than you would expect from two lawyers. They were both enthusiastic about what they do, and their passion clearly showed. First, Andrew spoke generally about the firm, then more specifically about patents. The company was created in 2004 and has multiple locations, with about 75 employees. They work with clients on topics related to intellectual properties like copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. Andrew discussed patents in some detail while describing examples. One of these was of a young girl who created a water bottle that had a side fill option to solve the problem of filling bottles in shallow sinks. Often, creating new products can be challenging because they open the doors to new legal issues. Victor then took over the second half of the presentation to discuss trademarks, copyrights, and industrial design, which was equally as intriguing.
“For every invention, you create a problem”
Andrew – Valea
After lunch in the cafeteria, we had an hour to kill, so we wandered around in Nordstan. Nordstan is the largest mall in Europe, which is crazy because Woodfield Mall is way bigger. There were many unfamiliar stores, but also some major chains like H&M or Zara that we also have in the states.
The second company we visited was Xylem, a large water technology provider. I found this presentation on the fresh water crisis and Xylem’s products to be very interesting because I used to be an environmental science major. It’s nice to see an intersection between business and environmental efforts where their company runs a successful business while working to make water use more sustainable. It’s crazy to me that most people don’t think about their water usage, even though so many people in the world don’t have access to clean water and there is only a finite amount of fresh water on earth.
After the company visits, we wandered around the city a bit before having dinner at O’Learys again. Lauren and I shared the vegan quesadilla which was amazing. We even stayed to bowl for some time.
Daily Reflections:
- Patents help stimulate innovation, sustainable business, and healthy competition within industries.
- Loving what you do is very important for your career.
- It takes 7 liters of water to make a plastic water bottle, but only 1 to fill it up.
- Xylem has a pump in the tallest building in the world.
- The demand for freshwater will increase by 5% by 2050.
Adventures in Sweden 