What sets Ouriginal apart from its counterparts is that it combines a text matching system with author recognition.” – Andreas Ohlson, Chief Executive Officer of Ouriginal

With too much information available at the click of a mouse or a touch on your smart phone, plagiarism just cannot be ruled out. Despite the Copyright Act and Intellectual Property Rights Act in place, gross violations of these have been noticed.

Advancements in technology led to the advent of software systems and apps that could check for plagiarism in a content. This made it easy to detect the ‘copy-paste’ matter in any text.

And while there are many software programmes or apps that detect plagiarism, Ouriginal came up with a unique plagiarism detection and prevention system. It combines a text-matching system with author recognition. This innovative technology is aimed at providing fairness and help people assert their originality.

The combination of Urkund and PlagScan gave rise to Ouriginal, and its users ranging from corporates, to individuals to education institutes and universities worldwide can vouch for its efficacy and reliability. Urkund was founded in the year 1999 and PlagScan in 2009. They joined hands this year with a common goal and founded Ouriginal.

“Ouriginal was born out of two companies that not only developed equally good, cutting-edge plagiarism detection software but were also driven by the same goals and core values. Both Urkund and PlagScan were established by people that came from an educational background and discovered the need to protect something that is increasingly endangered by modern technologies: the freedom of every student to develop their full potential by original thinking and creative writing. This is the reason why we developed a solution to help teachers save time while correcting student’s exam papers and to safeguard Academic Integrity and the quality of education,” shared Ohlson.

Ouriginal offers wide benefits for both new and existing customers: together, they are bigger and better in many aspects. By choosing the best solution and processes from both companies across all departments, they are confident of delivering ‘best of breed’ performance in many facets. Also, by combining the technologies of these two companies, they plan to optimize their existing products into one solution that exceeds the performance and functionality of both single products.

To cut it short, together, they can address the needs of the market as well as existing customers when, and how they require it in the best possible way.

The inspiration behind the concept of the company

Ouriginal wants to provide an environment in which fairness sparks personal development and enables people to strengthen their original voice.

The company strongly believes that every human has great potential that just waits to be unlocked and developed. Yet sometimes, insecurities, stress, anxiety, or simply life get in the way and people tend to use short cuts.

Using Ouriginal will help one assess any type of text for their authenticity and tackle questions of academic integrity at any institution. In addition, by using our solutions, educators and other users will save precious time to focus on their real work.

Ouriginal aims to:

• Help students learn the right methodology to prevent unintentional plagiarism
• Ensure schools and universities stay respected institutions that provide highly relevant degrees
• Support businesses to validate their content and guarantee its authenticity

On why the company is called ‘Our’iginal, Ohlson said, “Because we believe that promoting and developing original thinking is not just the responsibility of a single person, of one single parent, one single teacher, professor, or mentor. Unlocking people’s full potential is actually OUR responsibility and our goal.”

Exhibiting Quality

Ouriginal is a text-matching software that can assess the authenticity and originality of any given text. This software is often used as plagiarism prevention in education institutions or as an authenticity solution in corporations. It can easily and seamlessly be integrated into already existing workflows and processes, either through a learning management system (LMS) or as a stand-alone solution. With its feedback and digital examination capabilities, it offers a state-of-the-art solution to meet the requirements of an increasingly digitized education landscape.

Being in the business for over 20 years, Ouriginal has gained lot of insights into the market – and especially to the needs of educators. Cutting-edge technology such as machine learning algorithms allows training its software to get smarter every time a text is analysed.

In the near future, ghost-writing detection and crosslanguage text matching will be some of the new features. Redefining the future of the ed-tech sector Currently, education itself is redefining Ed-Tech and its future – accelerated by the pandemic. This removes the stigma of Ed-Tech as a niche market. Before the ‘new normal’, digital solutions were perceived as a ‘nice-to-have’ add-on to courses and processes within an educational organization.

Nowadays, digital and personalized learning tools like that of Ouriginal, are becoming essential. They are now not only important as a tool to enable online courses through a new medium but are also needed to ensure institutional quality control. This is a major shift and Ouriginal is playing a vital role in this. With the exponential growth in demand for Ed-Tech solutions, the company will be enabling new ways of learning and teaching in a new, digitized world.

Growing and Sustaining

Ouriginal has been able to grow and sustain in the everchanging market by being adaptive and flexible in an industry that can be complex and rigid at times. And by putting its customer’s needs above all. To ensure it sustains its position and keep challenging the status quo, it decided to join forces and further establish one true European heavyweight on the Ed-Tech market.

With their combined expertise of over 30 years in the industry, Ohlson is very confident that they are well aligned to react to developments that lay in front of them. The company boasts of an extremely talented and hard-working team behind Ouriginal from extremely diverse backgrounds, ready to tackle the future.

Staying at the Top with ‘Ouriginality’

Ouriginal originated from two relatively small companies. Both companies were very customer-centric and driven to excel in customer satisfaction. Being small, both companies could react very quickly, agilely, and efficiently to customer’s wishes, needs, and demands. This has been the company’s legacy, and this is what Ouriginal continues to do: Treating customers with respect and really caring about them.

Proof for that can be found in every aspect of the customer journey and user experience. Ouriginal offers a sustainable and transparent business model that works well for customers financially and is easy to understand and forecast. The development of its features is not driven by what its engineers could develop to make the company look super-techy, but what the customers really need. The company’s thumb-rule is to listen, learn and implement. To enable customers to easily integrate the services into existing workflows and processes, the company focuses on developing reliable partnerships and support integrations. Also, with its truly European roots, it firmly believes that protecting user data should be one of its core responsibilities. Their solution is – it is up to the customer to do with their data whatever they want: Store it, archive it, or delete it – whenever they want.

The customers help to keep the balance between product diversification and adapting to the evolving global education landscape while safeguarding originality in all its different shades.

Overcoming Adversities

Ohlson emphasises that they are here because they had the chance to develop into what they are today. They were given the chance; they have had the stamina and perseverance to get exactly here. What else does one really need than knowing that one could give others exactly the same opportunities with what one does?

As former niche players in the plagiarism prevention market, it was and is the company’s driving force to safeguard integrity while inspiring originality – by listening to its customers. Every time educators provide feedback to them that Ouriginal’s tool made their life better, easier, and saves them tons of time. That is what drives the company to perform better. It’s the many success stories that keep the company moving successfully and the fact that its software is such an integral and essential part of academic life that it is part of comedy videos on YouTube and in some parts even thought of as a governmental institution.

Latest developments and staying at pace with them

The pandemic has of course had a huge impact on how education is managed and distributed. From the company’s perspective, they have seen a massive increase in usage since plagiarism detection is even more important when students are working from home and not sitting in a classroom. Ouriginal believes that this will accelerate a change where distance and remote learning will be more common, especially in higher education.

This will demand the customers to find better solutions to craft for their needs and Ouriginal wants to be a part of this conversation to understand what it needs to improve or develop. In this backdrop, it has already started a project where it interviews quite a few of its customers in different regions to understand better the challenges they face and based on the outcome of that Ouriginal assumes that a number of activities will follow to stay at pace.

Foresight about Ed-Tech

There are predictions that in 2025, the Ed-Tech industry will already overtake the healthcare industry by revenue. The Earth’s population is growing, technologies are developing further – and why should people not get the chance to learn? This is a huge opportunity, but also a big responsibility for a company like Ouriginal.

Especially in the light of the pandemic, the company notices that education per se, as well as its demands for digital solutions, has changed and increased tremendously. With the ‘forced’ demand of higher education for distance, online and blended learning during the times of the pandemic, educators are forced to face a digitized reality in their classrooms. They needed to get accustomed to a new normal in terms of teaching and online learning, and this has already changed their mindset regarding digitized learning.

According to Ouriginal, there will be a huge increase in online classes and degrees from universities across the globe. Students will not need to go abroad to study for a degree. They can, for example, continue to live in Stockholm and get a degree from a university in Australia.

Ohlson is convinced that within a timeframe of 5-10 years, the educational landscape worldwide will have changed profoundly. This will also have a great impact on the company as a technology and solution provider. Here, the relationship with the customers will be crucial. He believes that only if they listen to the demands of the customers in terms of new products and solutions, they will be able to serve the market and education as before. And this is exactly what Ouriginal is planning to do.

Future goals

In the short-term, the company’s focus is to merge its companies both from an organizational and a product perspective. This is of course a challenge, especially since the world is in the middle of a pandemic, with high usage of Ouriginal’s product and many new customers. It helped that both companies shared the same ambition and goals while embarking on this project. It is their firm belief that when they have finalized this stage, they will have an organization and a product ready to serve and support their current and new customers even better.

In the longer-term, the company’s aim is to use its combined talent to improve its core product, use technology to find new areas of application – either on their own or together with their partners from within the Ed-Tech sector. They are striving to build joint products that provide their users with enhanced workflow, improved user experience, and most importantly create a better environment for students to learn and be Ouriginal.

About the Leader

Andreas Ohlson, Chief Executive Officer of Ouriginal has a long history and proven track record in the Ed-Tech industry, starting way back in 2004 when he was in charge of operations at PrioInfo, the then market-leading Nordic distributor for digital distribution of content working with most of the leading publishers. He has been CEO since 2007 and has been responsible for developing Urkund from a small Nordic player into a market leader in a sustainable and responsible way.

By combining the strengths of Urkund and PlagScan, he is now establishing a company with global presence and influence. His expertise from leading one the biggest Contact Centre operations in Sweden, where he delivered state-of-the-art customer service to both B2C and B2B publishers, is definitely a great asset in creating a global heavyweight within the Ed-Tech industry.

Andreas has seen many technology shifts during his career and has managed to tackle these along with the skilled development team. This will help Ouriginal immensely to stay at the forefront, especially now in times where we see a transformation and real shift of education globally towards digitalization.