Innovative minds

BY NADIA LOUISE KRISTENSEN

Denmark may not have a large headcount, but it has plenty of minds that can think out of the box and create new ideas

Despite high wages, significant IT projects are being placed in Denmark. High wage demands are counterbalanced by Danish IT folk having a reputation for thinking out of the box.

“We have an educational system that provides a framework for creativity and gives plenty of space for stimulating young minds. Different and creative ideas are valued,” says Professor Mogens Kühn Pedersen of Copenhagen Business School, who conducts IT industry research comparing Asia with the West.

Professor Pedersen has been in close contact with the bright minds who have developed some clever things that have become acknowledged worldwide, for instance the developers of Skype.

Søren Steen Rasmussen, who is a partner in Vækstfonden, a government backed fund that invests in budding, innovative companies in Denmark, thinks that Danes are very much self-starters:

“We solve problems without the framework being given in advance. We get things done and it is very rewarding when you are developing things. We achieve more that way than if you had an expert sitting at the top dishing out orders, because then it never gets better than the one at the top.”

New figures from Vækstfonden show that the Danish venture market is among the best in the world in attracting foreign capital.

“We have something that is so innovative that it attracts more investors than anywhere else in the world,” says Søren Steen Rasmussen.

COLLABORATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

According to Mogens Kühn Pedersen, one of the great challenges in the West is that fewer people are taking a degree in IT, while in India and China, IT courses are seeing an influx of students.

That is also the reason for a Danish initiative where major powers in IT have been brought together to create something bigger. In Århus, Jutland, they have created the IT City of Katrinebjerg, a centre for companies, research and education in IT, with 18,000 students and 100 companies.

“Many interesting products and development projects are coming out of this. And we are actually seeing a significant increase in the number of students who want to study computer science,” says Ole Lehrmann, director of the Alexandra Institute, which heads the IT City of Katrinebjerg.

“In Denmark we are good at making collaborations between research, companies and users. Research provides the latest knowledge, companies provide the commercial angle and users ensure that the products can actually be used for something,” explains Ole Lehrmann.

DANE HEADS TEAM DEVELOPING GOOGLE CHROME’S V8 ENGINE

The IT City of Katrinebjerg is also where Google has placed its department developing V8, the engine in Google’s new browser, Chrome.

llustration by Lars Chrois

Lars Bak, Tech Lead Manager at Google, attracted the development department to Århus.

“We wanted Lars Bak on board with us, and he wanted to use Århus as a base for building up his unit, as he thinks there is great engineering talent there, especially by Aarhus University. And since Lars is the one who has the knowledge about virtual machines, which is the core part of Google Chrome’s V8 engine, it was only natural to develop it there,” says Kay Oberback, Google Spokesperson Northern & Central Europe.

Lars Bak was contacted by Google two years ago and asked to build a department which would develop the JavaScript engine, V8, for Chrome – a browser that differs from many competitors’ browsers by having open source codes. Others can see the work that has been done by Lars Bak, his team and all the others who have been involved in the project.

“One of the primary objectives of Chrome is to get innovation into the browser market – we are interested in our competitors benefiting from the code. In that way we can raise the level for all browsers,” says Lars Bak.

The Danish team had to reinvent the wheel in many ways. They had to make an engine for the browser that could execute JavaScript rapidly and efficiently. According to Google’s own analysis, they have succeeded.

Lars Bak, Tech Lead Manager at Google – in Denmark also known as one of the ’Google boys’.