Employee inventions and compensation: what to do in the first ten days comes down to four steps: get the disclosure in writing, establish whether the invention falls within the employee's duties, decide whether the employer will claim assignment, and preserve dated records before anything is discussed informally with the inventor.
Who this concerns
This concerns any employer whose staff can plausibly create something patentable, technically valuable or otherwise protectable in the ordinary course of their work: product development teams, engineering functions, laboratories, and increasingly software teams whose output touches patentable subject matter alongside copyright. It applies to Swedish companies and, just as much, to foreign parent companies whose Swedish subsidiary employs the inventor, because the disclosure event and the obligations it triggers attach to the employment relationship, not to where the group's decision-makers sit.
It also concerns founders. In early-stage companies the person who invents and the person who holds equity are frequently the same individual, and the absence of a formal employment contract does not remove the question, it only makes the answer harder to establish. HR and legal functions are the practical owners of the first ten days, but the decision about whether to claim rights and how to value the invention usually sits with whoever controls the company's intellectual property strategy.
What the law says
Under Swedish law as it currently stands, the starting position is that rights to an invention belong to the person who made it. Where the invention arises within the scope of an employee's duties, or makes substantial use of the employer's knowledge or facilities, the employer typically has a basis to require assignment or a right of use. That right to claim assignment does not remove the inventor's separate entitlement to reasonable compensation, and this holds even where the employer ultimately acquires full rights to the invention.
There is no single statutory formula that produces a compensation figure automatically. The assessment looks at the commercial value the invention represents, the extent to which the employer's resources contributed to it, the employee's role and seniority, and what the employment contract already says about inventions and intellectual property. Many Swedish employment relationships sit under collective agreements that include their own provisions on inventor compensation, and where a collective agreement applies, its terms generally take precedence over the general default position rather than sitting alongside it.
The position changes when a foreign element enters the picture. If the employment contract is governed by a law other than Swedish law, if the inventor was seconded from or to a group entity abroad, or if the invention is to be filed and enforced in multiple jurisdictions rather than only in Sweden, the assignment analysis and the compensation analysis can proceed on different legal bases at the same time. A group structure with a foreign parent does not automatically resolve which entity ends up holding the rights, and that question is worth settling before, not after, a patent application or a Unified Patent Court filing names an applicant.
How it works in practice
Day one: get the disclosure in writing
The single most consequential action in the first ten days is turning an oral disclosure into a written one, dated and signed by the employee, describing what was invented, when, and in connection with which task. Everything that follows depends on this record existing before positions harden or memories drift.
Day two and three: map the invention against the employment contract
Pull the employment contract, any IP assignment clause it contains, the job description, and any applicable collective agreement. The question is narrow and factual: does the invention fall within the scope of what this employee was engaged to do, or did it arise outside that scope using the employer's time or equipment. The answer determines which side of the assignment question you are on before any compensation conversation starts.
Day three to five: assess commercial and technical significance
A quick internal assessment of what the invention is worth, and to whom, shapes everything downstream. This does not need to be a formal valuation at this stage, but it needs to be honest: an invention with marginal commercial relevance is handled very differently from one that could anchor a product line or a licensing position.
Day five to seven: decide on assignment and notify the employee
Decide, and communicate the decision, on whether the employer will claim assignment of the invention. Silence is itself a decision with consequences, because delay can be read later as acceptance of the employee's continued ownership, particularly where the employee has in the meantime taken steps such as filing or disclosing the invention externally.
Day seven to eight: identify co-inventors and external collaborators
Check whether anyone else contributed, including contractors, university collaborators, or staff of another group entity. Co-inventorship and third-party contribution change both the rights analysis and who is owed what, and they are far easier to establish while the project team still remembers who did what.
Day eight to nine: preserve technical and dated records
Lab notebooks, source repositories, design files, email threads and meeting notes should be preserved in their original, dated form. This is evidentiary work, not documentation for its own sake: a compensation dispute two years later is won or lost on whether the timeline of who contributed what can still be reconstructed.
Day nine to ten: open the compensation conversation
Once the assignment decision is made and the internal assessment of significance is done, open a structured conversation with the employee about compensation. Doing this before the rights position is settled tends to create expectations that are difficult to walk back; doing it after settles the conversation on a factual footing rather than a speculative one.
What to check
- Whether the employment contract contains an express IP assignment or invention clause, and what it actually says
- Whether a collective agreement applies to this employee and what it provides on inventor compensation
- Whether the invention was made using the employer's time, equipment, confidential information or facilities
- Whether the employee's role description covers the technical area of the invention
- Whether anyone outside the employer's own staff contributed to the invention
- Whether a patent or other filing has already been made, by either party, anywhere
- Whether the employee is engaged under a Swedish law employment contract or a foreign one
- Whether the invention is intended to be exploited or filed in more than one jurisdiction
What happens if the employee refuses to sign an assignment of the invention?
Refusal does not on its own defeat the employer's underlying claim if the invention genuinely falls within the scope of the employee's duties; the claim rests on the facts of how the invention arose, not on the employee's cooperation. In practice, though, refusal signals a dispute that is better addressed directly, since it usually means the employee disagrees with the employer's assessment of scope or value rather than the principle of assignment itself.
Does compensation apply if the employer decides not to use the invention?
The obligation to consider reasonable compensation is tied to the employer having acquired rights to the invention, not to the employer actually commercialising it. An employer that claims assignment and then shelves the invention has still taken the benefit of exclusivity, and that is generally enough to keep the compensation question open rather than closing it.
How does this work if the inventor is a contractor rather than an employee?
The default employee inventions framework is built around the employment relationship and does not automatically extend to contractors, consultants or agency staff. Their position depends on the contract for services under which they work, which is why contractor engagements involving technical development should carry their own explicit IP assignment terms rather than relying on the employee inventions position by default.
The numbers
There is no fixed statutory percentage that produces a compensation figure, and treating the question as arithmetic is one of the more common ways employers get it wrong. What actually drives cost is the combination of the invention's commercial significance, the number of people whose contribution needs to be untangled, whether filings already exist in more than one jurisdiction, and how well the contractual and factual record was preserved in the first place.
The ten-day window referenced throughout this material is not a statutory deadline; nothing in Swedish law fixes disclosure or assignment decisions to a ten-day period. It is the practical window within which the position is still fully recoverable, because after it the record starts to degrade, informal conversations start to substitute for documentation, and the employer's negotiating position on both assignment and compensation weakens correspondingly.
Where it usually goes wrong
The clearest failure pattern is the spare-time invention: something created using the employer's equipment or confidential information but outside the employee's formal duties, where neither side has a clean claim and both sides assume they do. A close second is the absence of any written IP clause in the employment contract at all, which leaves the entire assignment question resting on an argument about scope of duties rather than on agreed terms.
Founder situations reverse the usual logic entirely: where the inventor holds equity and no formal employment contract exists, there may be no employer to claim assignment from in the first place, and the analysis shifts to shareholder agreements and founder IP assignment deeds rather than employment law.
Cross-border secondment breaks the default analysis in a different way. If the employment contract is governed by a foreign law, or the inventor was seconded from a group entity outside Sweden, the assignment and compensation questions can be governed by two different legal regimes simultaneously, and assuming Swedish law applies throughout because the invention was made in Sweden is a common and expensive mistake.
Contractors and consultants sit outside the employee inventions position altogether, and treating a contractor's invention as if the same default rules applied is a frequent source of disputes that could have been avoided with a contractual assignment clause agreed before the work started.
Finally, opening the compensation conversation before the assignment decision is settled tends to anchor the employee's expectations to a figure that has no basis in the eventual legal position, and unwinding that later is harder than simply sequencing the two decisions correctly from day one.
What to do next
The first ten days are documentation and decision work: get the disclosure in writing, map it against the contract, decide on assignment, and preserve the record. Where this stops being something an HR or legal function can complete alone is valuation and cross-border exposure, particularly where the invention is destined for filing in more than one jurisdiction or where a foreign parent company's structure affects who ends up holding the rights.
That is the point at which a focused position assessment is the more useful next step than further internal review. If the dispute in front of you is actually about a competitor copying a product rather than an employee's compensation claim, the relevant starting point is different, and the first ten days for product design disputes sets out that separate sequence. For the broader context this situation sits within, the intellectual property and UPC practice overview is the wider reference point.