The origins of the Uppsala Patent History Group can be traced back to 2010 and the publication of the edited volume “Patent och pirater” (Patents and pirates) by the Centre for Business History (Centrum för Näringslivshistoria) where Professors Mats Larsson and Fredrik Tell contributed with a chapter on historical patent strategies of two Swedish “snilleföretag” (genius enterprises): ASEA and Separator. The main title of this chapter is “Skyddad eller oskyddad?” (Protected or unprotected?) which was maintained in the formation of a research program proposal that was granted funding the same year from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.

 

In 2011, David Andersson joined Fredrik and Mats as a PhD student in the group, together with a couple of other PhD students.  The data collected in David Andersson’s doctoral dissertation The Emergence of Markets for Technology: Patent Transfers and Patenting in Sweden, 1819-1914 (2016) would form the basis of what is now the Swedish Historical Patents infrastructure. For the dissertation, Andersson manually collected and digitized unique information on over 45,000 Swedish patents to present an analysis focusing on how a significant proportion of these patents were transferred in markets for technologies that emerged in late 19th century Sweden as the patent system was reformed in 1885. The development of the dissertation database was enabled by a one-year visit to Professor Patricio Sáiz at the Department of Economic Analysis: Economic Theory and Economic History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. While acting as a co-supervisor to Andersson, Sáiz could share his expertise of building a historical patent database together with the Spanish Patent Office (OEPM).

 

Drawing upon this work, a proposal for infrastructure funding was submitted Riksbankens Jubileumsfond which was granted funding in 2017, which emanated in the official inauguration of Swedish Historical Patents in 2022 by the Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University, Professor Anders Hagfeldt and the Director General of PRV Peter Strömbäck. The work of digitizing and registering information about ca 122,000 patents was conducted by research assistants and in close collaborations with the Swedish Intellectual Property Office (PRV). When Matti La Mela joined the group in 2020 as a post-doctoral research fellow funded by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, collaboration commenced with Helsinki University/Aalto University and the research group headed by Professor Jari Eloranta through a research grant from the Peter Wallenberg foundation.​

 

The collaboration between the Swedish and Finnish research groups facilitated the construction of a dataset of Finnish historical patents similar to the Swedish one, where the Finnish group collaborated with in collaboration with the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH). The utilization of the combined Swedish and Finnish data has been used to examine patent agents as network intermediaries between the two countries (Andersson & La Mela, 2020) and international historical patent families (Andersson, La Mela & Tell, 2024). Concomitantly, the Swedish data was used in analyzing issues such as mass migration and technological change (Andersson, Karadja & Prawitz, 2022) and the role of infrastructure for inventive activities (Andersson, Berger & Prawitz, 2023), and in several on-going projects on inventors and innovation during the second industrial revolution.

 

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While research grants have contributed to the on-going research utilizing the Swedish Historical Patents database and adjacent sources, the maintenance and upgrading of the database have mainly been funded by Uppsala University (through infrastructure funding from the Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Business Studies, respectively). Through this work, it became apparent that recent developments in computational methods should be applicable to the structuring and analysis of historical patent data. In 2024, the group got funding for a pilot project with the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University for testing out natural language models for historical patent text analysis. The results were very promising and later the same year, Fredrik Tell and Matti La Mela received funding for a PhD position from the Lundberg foundations for a PhD position to continue this work.

 

In Fall of 2024, Yunting Xie formally joined the group as she enrolled as a PhD student. The year before she did an internship in the group as part of her master’s education in Digital Humanities. The internship emanated in a study and a webpage examining Japanese patentees in Sweden. Yunting also wrote her master thesis examining Japanese patent agents and their international Patenting Activities between 1922-1940. She is now working on the development and application of computational methods to study invention and innovation through patent documents and historical inventive activity between Sweden and Japan.