Flexibility, salesmanship and a good location. These are the words that immediately spring to mind when asked to explain just why Danish IT and technology companies so often excel and become world leaders in their field.

Competence and innovation are other words that apply as well. But also these characteristics have undoubtedly played a part in some of our recent successes they are not uniquely Danish traits – most commercial successes in the Western world can also claim them as their own.

What really sets Denmark apart is its fortuitous blend of positive ingredients.

This special combination – a Magic Mix of Circumstances – is in my eyes directly responsible for Denmark’s consistently high ranking on global IT scoreboards.

During the last ten years or so, Denmark has frequently come first in these rankings and has never scored lower than fifth place.

There is no one single trick that makes this success in the IT and technology field happen. But the main ingredients in our magic mix, I will try to describe in the following pages.

FLEXIBILITY
Until recently, flexibility was an often overlooked factor in the relatively successful Danish way of life and the way in which innovation was leveraged to produce good business results.

Today, "flexicurity" has become a key to describing the way Danish society is structured – and I cannot help believe that strongly intensified international contact and globalisation in recent years has helped us better recognise and quantify this speciality.

Our labour market – also in the IT and technology industries – is among the most flexible in Europe, if not the most flexible.

Hiring and firing are relatively easy operations in Denmark – not in absolute terms but compared to other more rigidly regulated markets.

We do have trade unions and other mechanisms but generally we tend to downplay the formal parts of contracts and solve problems through dialogue and the creation of new opportunities for skilled people. We also, despite our recent introduction of tight rules of immigration, have green cards and quick lines for experts from abroad coming here to add their special skills to our companies.

Our openness to the world, dating back thousands of years, remains reality today.
      And while our difficult language and inclement weather may be off-putting, our relaxed way of living is often cited as a definite plus.

Once inside a Danish IT or technology company, you will probably find another meaning of "flexibility" that accounts directly for many business successes.

For some reason that lies beyond my capacity to explain, hierarchy has never caught on in Denmark as much as in other countries.

Few Danish IT- and tech companies have a top-down structure where the founder/owner/CEO decides it all – and employees are obedient servants of a greater cause.

In everyday life, a flat management structure prevails – creating maximum room for ideas and proposals coming from the employees themselves.

This strongly enhances a quick and varied development of products and services. Do not imagine that we sit all day in circles and groups discussing, we don’t. But please do believe that we tend to listen carefully to each other, across hierarchy and salary levels.

Our much criticised public school system, among the most expensive in the world with not so flattering results, really does produce a lot of individuals who are used to stating their opinion, having an often sound critical attitude to the teacher and, later, the boss at their job.

Our flexibility therefore allows a lot of "steam" and a lot of wild ideas to be let out – and be tested. Some founders of Danish IT and tech successes have a traditional strong theoretical background in engineering or computer science.

Others have sparse education combined with some experience from the lower levels of the job market. Somewhere, they became critical to existing products or services. An idea developed, and – as such as happened with Skype – rocketed into big business.

Allow me: sometimes the Danish innovator is like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, detecting and daring to say that the emperor wears nothing...

SALESMANSHIP
No solid IT or technology business can operate without the expertise of properly trained engineers, computer scientists, etc.

That is the reason why IT-Branchen (The Danish IT Industry Association) has been clamouring at politicians’ doors for years with the same call: give us more engineers, give us more computer scientists!

Every country needs as many of these highly skilled and rigorously educated individuals as it can possibly get. That said, this is only one part of the Magic Mix of Circumstances I believe we have in Denmark.

Being located solidly in the middle of Europe – where North (Scandinavia) meets South (Mainland Europe) and East (Baltic) meets West (Anglo-Saxon World), we are used to trading.

As a country with limited natural resources, trade has long been our way of life. The Vikings were first and foremost trades people who traversed vast distances to ply their wares.

Today, backed up by strong universities of technology, our special touch is often that not only can we produce new things – we also sell them quickly.

Commercialisation is, as often with "simple selling", an underestimated dimension in the successes and failures of IT and technology industries.

You do not always need to be first with your idea or your product. But you need to be first to market – in the right place at the right time when buyers come.

In the recent cases of Navision/Damgaard or Giga, you certainly had excellent products ready for a wider use in broader markets. But you also had very skilled salesmen, knowing exactly when to sell to make the most of it.

The high-end technology company, full of highly skilled engineers with few salespeople on board, is probably not Danish. We do not underestimate the critical importance of the sales function. The people in the sales team quite rightly deserve respect in our business environment.

Our IT trade balance is still somewhat negative. We import more IT than we export. But the gap is closing. My ambition is to have a net export of Danish IT products and services by 2010. The fast development of the digital entertainment industry and the concept of the Digital Home will help us achieve that mission.

LOCATION
I have deliberately tried to focus on the less conspicuous sides of Danish IT successes – omitting some obvious points of the role of our universities and our wellorganised, data-ready and data-enabled public sector.

As customers we are not so many (being 5.4 million Danes) but we are critical and curious users of IT and technology products, making us an excellent test market.

My last point, though, will be simpler than all that: our location.

Our country is, as I said earlier, well placed in rich Northern Europe – but we’re not so remote that reindeer roam freely about in our streets.

The airport of Copenhagen links easily with East (Asia/Japan) and West (New York/Seattle), making many global players place their Northern European or even European HQ here.

The list, counting IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Dell, CA, SAP and more, is impressive and has more impact on us and the development of our IT environment that one would think at first sight.

The global IT players normally set up more than a mere sales office in Denmark. Sooner or later, they tend to step up their involvement – getting access to local skills and exchanging skills with the locals.

In a country that has no IT or technology locomotives the size of Nokia or Ericsson, this is an ideal mix on top of our Danish owned and locally managed skills.

The blend of local, smaller partners and foreign locomotives with global professionalism on board, gives an environment where new ideas mix and develop well.

At its best, this is globalisation in a nutshell. Interdependence for a cause, bringing local and global partners a step further.

There is, as I said, no simple recipe to make all this happen. But there is a day-to-day task in staying on top of this, keeping flexibility and salesmanship in good shape and keeping airports – and most importantly – our minds open.

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