Turning Business Education on its Head

How Anne Kirah and the 180°academy are promoting creative thinking in business leaders—to ensure that Denmark's economy stays competitive

by Jay Greene

Anne Kirah, dean of 180°academy. nicky bonne/redux pictures

In September about 20 executives, mostly from Scandinavia, hopped on a plane for a trip designed to shatter their notions of how to do business. The group, comprised of the first batch of students at a new Danish school called 180°academy, jetted off to South Africa. There they worked with a group called the Business Place to help would-be entrepreneurs realize such dreams as opening a hair salon or starting a toy business, though they had no relevant experience or skills.

The program isn't anything like business school, where students focus largely on areas of their expertise. And that's the point. Conventional business education leads executives to build on their strengths—improving profit margins, boosting efficiency, and benchmarking the best practices of rivals. This school aims to teach midcareer executives something many think is unteachable: how to be innovative. "We've got to break them from what they know best," says Anne Kirah, the academy's kinetic, gum-chewing, American dean. "When you're only focused on your competition and what you know best, you don't innovate."

Innovation Lessons from an Anthropologist

Kirah, 46, spent seven years as a design anthropologist at Microsoft (MSFT), leaving at the end of 2006 to help launch the school. At Microsoft she studied how Web surfers used its various MSN Web sites. She then reported back to the designers about the obstacles Web surfers stumbled over trying to find information. Her job was to help the company shift from being a PC-centric company to becoming an online operation by educating its managers about their new consumers. At Boeing (BA), before her Microsoft stint, Kirah helped the airplane maker design a better cabin experience by studying how passengers acted on long-haul flights. With undergrad and graduate degrees in social and cultural anthropology and psychology, Kirah is now teaching similar lessons to a larger audience of executives. She's shaking managers out of their traditional ways of doing things and forcing them, perhaps for the first time, to understand their customers' cultures and to discern their needs.

In Soweto, for example, some students recommended that the South African entrepreneurs hire experts to gin up business plans. It's a ludicrous suggestion for entrepreneurs whose needs are far more basic than the latest McKinsey & Co. type of strategy. "These are supersmart guys, but when the pressure is on, they revert to the behavior that made them successful," Kirah says. In this instance, the most successful students listened to the experts in the Business Place to guide the entrepreneurs toward the best solutions.

Too few executives understand how to come up with breakthrough ideas—and bring them to market. Some Scandinavian companies have it nailed. Their names are familiar—Nokia (NOK), Bang & Olufsen, Ikea, Ericsson (ERIC), Electrolux (ELUX). But dozens of others remain clueless. And even at successful companies, the actual number of people who know how to connect with consumers and how to innovate is small. "We have a few people who have really mastered this," says Mads Nipper, executive vice-president for markets and products at LEGO, which enrolled two employees in 180°'s first class in the fall. "If those people left the company, we'd be in trouble."

Denmark Leads in Innovation Policy

That's why LEGO, Bang & Olufsen, Nokia, and others have joined with the Danish government to launch the school.