Close ties between academia and business keep Norway at the innovation forefront

Professor Tor Andreassen’s family used to run a suitcase factory. They made the suitcases and a third party sold them to people who needed them. They didn’t know much about their customers back then because the technology to do so simply didn’t exist.

“If you had told my father to embed sensors into his suitcases to collect data, he would have thought I was smoking something,” says Andreassen.

Today we live in a world in which we can capture data from just about anything.

User and usage data can be collected, stored, analysed, and used to make better, smarter decisions in business. Even a suitcase business. This is changing enterprise as we know it. It’s disrupting business models. And it’s lifting the veil that once separated companies and customers, creating a direct line to the heart of what people really want.  

A long-time NHH professor of strategy and management, Andreassen speaks passionately about digital transformation. He’s excited by what he calls the “turbo-charging” of Norway’s digitalisation during the Covid-19 crisis and the new wave of technology that has taken the country by storm. But he has a concern as well.

“While it’s important for Norway to be on the frontlines of IT, AI and IoT technology, we also need to be sure to capture economic value from these technologies.”

The perfect storm of AI, 5G, IoT and cloud computing has hit Norway, but Andreassen is worried that all our investment will go into making the technology rather than understanding how to use it and extract value from it. Inventions and innovations are like Yin and Yang; you can’t have one without the other. We must balance research into both areas, he says. 

These concerns were shared by Telenor, one of the makers of such technologies and a decades-long friend and partner to NHH. Together, they envisioned a new kind of arena to address these challenges, planting the seeds for what is now the Digital Transformation Hub@NHH, or the Hub@NHH. Established in 2019, the Hub’s purpose is to ignite a dialogue among Norway’s corporates, stimulating new ideas and putting a spotlight on the problems that need solving.

Value creation, innovation, and transformation in a digital era is the crux of perhaps every subject brought up at the Hub. Innovation, such as commercialising an invention, is something that Andreassen claims is all too often being done in the wrong way and needs to change.

“Data from the Norwegian Innovation Index indicates that most businesses today innovate in their customer relationship area to safeguard their cashflow rather than do what is best for customers. That means that innovation is done to lock people into subscriptions or services to cement the relationship, which isn’t necessarily to the customer’s advantage.”

Dialogue is the mother of all ideas. The Hub members bring perspectives from their respective industries, using expertise from NHH, combined with insights from their peers, to re-frame the problems and weigh the pros and cons of disrupting their own business models. 

“I was recently speaking to peers in the U.S. and Australia, and they are drooling over what we have achieved. We have managed to create an alliance – a true partnership – between academia and enterprise, using real business and real problems as our starting point. It’s unprecedented.” 

The partnership model that NHH has created is, as Andreassen says, rather unique. It means that when they send out a survey to corporates, NHH gets on average a 75-80% response rate. Harvard, on the other hand, typically gets 15-20%, according to Andreassen. He attributes this to the Scandinavian model, which is based on trust and cooperation.

“Why would a CEO want to talk to a researcher? To be truly relevant and interesting, researchers need to understand the business problem, and CEOs have an appetite for research that enables them to find the best implementation for complex problems. We need to work together rather than in parallel.”