Eugene Shteyn

Eugene Shteyn is an intellectual property strategist, inventor, entrepreneur, and early-stage MedTech investor. His operating career was built in corporate R&D and IP: he served as a principal scientist at Philips Research and later as director of IP licensing at Hewlett-Packard. His inventive work is embedded in widely used consumer-technology standards including DVD, UPnP, and DLNA. He is a named inventor on a large patent portfolio — sources cite 28 issued US patents (and 35+ across his career) plus more than 50 patents pending, spanning internet services, media streaming, medical systems, and superconducting devices.

He is the founder of Invention Spring, LLC (also associated with Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC), an invention-development and innovation-management consultancy whose clients have included Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, IBM, and Roche, alongside numerous Silicon Valley startups. He co-authored *Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals* (with Max Shtein; CRC Press/Routledge, 2013), a model-based framework for generating and evaluating breakthrough ideas.

Shteyn is a long-time instructor at the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program, where he has designed and taught multiple courses on model-based invention and innovation, including "Principles of Invention and Innovation," "The Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley," "The Patent Paradox," and "Scalable Innovation / Innovation Timing." He has also appeared as a speaker and mentor at venues such as VentureWell OPEN, the Masters & Robots conference, and SVIgnite.

On the investing side, Shteyn is Partner and Head of IP at Zoic Capital, an early-stage medical-technology fund, and in 2023 co-founded Blackwood Healthcare Breakthroughs (with Eric Tan and Chris Willenken), a seed-stage MedTech/life-science fund that closed its first fund in October 2023. He additionally serves as a board advisor to R3i Ventures, a cross-border angel investment fund based in Singapore.

• Stage: Seed and early-stage medical technology and life-science companies.
• Sectors: Biomedical engineering, cancer-related technologies, and healthcare platforms capable of gathering large volumes of unique, proprietary data at the earliest stages of commercial development.
• IP-first edge: Blackwood explicitly differentiates by combining venture funding with "hands-on support in IP strategy and operational execution, mirroring practices of large tech corporations" — i.e., applying Fortune 500–grade IP development and capture processes to startups.
• What makes him say yes: Companies with defensible, patentable innovation and a credible path to building proprietary data/IP moats — reflecting his career thesis that scalable innovation comes from systematic, model-based invention rather than luck.
• Hands-on, post-investment support: Emphasis on helping founders raise their innovation success rate through IP capture, not just capital.