Wingquist Laboratory envisions a fully digital product realization process, where complex, mechanical, assembled products and their production systems are developed and verified together, without need for physical prototypes or testing.
The ability to develop and verify new products and production systems with digital models, to reduce time and cost and increase quality, and thereby increase the competitiveness of Swedish manufacturing industry, has been the vision of Wingquist Laboratory since the start.
Wingquist Laboratory was founded in 2000. The main motivation was to stimulate research excellence in industrially important areas. Between 2007–2017 Wingquist Laboratory was a VINN Excellence Centre. Now the research centre is well established in both the research and industrial community. Since the start, Wingquist Laboratory has generated a large number of scientific publications, examinations and demonstrators that have resulted in broad implementation and use in industry.
Sven Wingquist – a global entrepreneur and social trendsetter
Sven Gustaf Wingqvist (1876-1953) was a Swedish engineer, inventor and industrialist, and one of the founders of Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) from which Volvo later was founded. He was one of the world’s leading ball and roller bearing makers. He invented the multi-row, self-aligning radial ball bearing in 1907. It is in his honour the competence centre started.
Vinn Excellence centre for 10 years
Since the start in 2000, Wingquist Laboratory has attracted approximately 500 MSEK in public funding and over the double in industrial in-kind contribution.
After becoming a VINN Excellence Centre in 2007, the centre has produced 92 journal publications, 228 conference publications, 50 PhD theses and a large number of industrial evaluations, where 35 have reached industrial implementation. There are 11 industrial partners connected to the centre. One of these is a spinoff company, IPS Sweden AB, formed to commercialize research results.
Wingquist Laboratory is today a well-established centre that has gone through a number of refinements after evaluations in the Vinnova VINN Excellence program.