Most granted patents held by electronics conglomerates never earn a penny. They sit in portfolios until they expire. A competition run by Singapore-based Piece Future is testing whether the better use is to hand them to young companies that cannot afford to research from scratch.
IPHatch UK 2026, now in its fourth British edition, awarded eight patents from Panasonic, Nokia, NEC and DENSO to five startups. Twenty-one companies pitched in Glasgow before the shortlist narrowed to the winners.
Who took what
CALMS International, a West Midlands enterprise software firm, picked up a NEC patent. Aberdeen’s Cyber Nandhini took one from Nokia. The Discourse AI in Suffolk won two Panasonic patents, and Mixd Reality in Staffordshire won a third from the same portfolio. RS9 Technologies, also West Midlands-based, walked away with three from DENSO.
Beyond the licence, the winners get a working relationship with the company that filed the patent, which matters more than the paperwork. That relationship is a route to co-development, investment and, eventually, customers in markets a five-person startup would struggle to reach.
Why cheap software makes IP matter more
The timing is not accidental. AI has collapsed the cost and time it takes to ship software, so product features alone are a thinner defence than they were three years ago. A granted patent, even one originally filed by a car parts supplier, is harder to copy than a feature set.
For the corporates, the arrangement turns dormant filings into options on startups that might use them. Piece Future says the programme has commercialised more than 350 patents and passed over 100 startups through 14 competitions in 12 markets. Europe has plenty of entrepreneurs, its ambassador Deepak Pathak argues. What it lacks are the doors those entrepreneurs keep knocking on.
