Jörgen Ahlberg

Jörgen Ahlberg has a background as engineer, developer, and scientist (M.Sc in Computer Science and Engineering, Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Docent in Computer Vision). After spending a decade as researcher and research leader at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, he changed path and spent the last decade working with startups and small high-tech companies.

By now, Jörgen has collected experience from failures as well as successes, and is currently active in companies like Visage Technologies, Termisk, Scienvisic, and Glana, all of them providing products and/or services related to sensing and computer vision. Also, he is Adjunct Associate Professor at Linköping University and Associate Professor at University of Oslo.

From research to entrepreneurship

Going from research to entrepreneurship, can’t be that difficult, can it? Just take some sciency stuff, make it a product, start selling it, preferrably as SaaS, and laugh all the way to the bank. After all, the internet is full of success stories and people getting filthy rich.

Alas, Jörgen didn’t manage to get filthy rich, but he has by now a collection of success and fail stories to tell (and a few cases yet to be determined), and maybe the failures – the ones that people usually don’t brag about on the internet – are better to learn from than the success stories? At least, they might be more entertaining, and where else can you hear about computer vision being used for preventing pirate attacks, investigating reindeer eating habits, diagnosing sick cows, monitoring district heating systems, and trying out makeup in the same presentation?