Professor Emeritus of Industrial Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). He was appointed Regius Professor in 1986 and is the founder and former chairman of the Center for Intellectual Property Studies (CIP) at Chalmers. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a lifetime fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2019). He co-founded the European Institute of Technology and Innovation Management in 2000.

He holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering (Chalmers), Mathematics and Business (University of Gothenburg), an M.Sc. in Operations Research (Stanford), and a Ph.D. in Industrial Management and Economics (Chalmers, 1979). His doctoral work was among the earliest in the field of technology management. He has published over 200 articles and nearly 20 books, including the highly cited The Economics and Management of Intellectual Property – Towards Intellectual Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 1999) and Evolving Properties of Intellectual Capitalism (2018). His research has advanced the understanding of multi-technology firms, intellectual property as a tool for innovation governance, and early concepts related to open innovation.