Turning Business Education on its Head

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The government is worried that if local companies aren't innovative, jobs will be swept away by the forces of globalization and the country's high standard of living will decline. The academy is the latest in a series of initiatives from the country cited by a World Economic Forum report in March as the top nation for innovation leadership and government policy. It's an unusual national strategy that shows how seriously national officials are taking the power of innovation and creative thinking. (Britain also has a national program, Designing Demand (BusinessWeek.com, 10/3/2007), intended to foster innovation within small business.)

180°academy has none of the trappings of academia. The school holds classes in a renovated 18th century building that it shares with several small startups. The building—called Mad House Denmark, because it used to be a psychiatric facility—is located in Middelfart, about two hours by train from Copenhagen.

Foreign Immersion Breaks Habits

The courses, broken into nine modules, or sessions that range from three to six days, are designed to push students to consider business challenges from new perspectives. In South Africa, they were dropped into an utterly foreign world. The idea was to help them figure out the importance of rejecting cookie-cutter business theory, instead grasping a deep understanding of customers and clients to come up with successful strategies. In October, 2008, the global modules will be held in Dubai, where traditional and modern Arabic cultures collide. Students will have five full days there to focus on branding issues in another vastly different culture from their own.

The other seven modules will take place in Denmark and focus on the process of innovation—ethnography, generating new concepts for products and services, and prototyping. Learning the discipline of innovation won't come cheap. Cost of tuition at the school: 289,000 Danish Krone, or nearly $57,000, for all nine sessions. To get into the academy executives must agree to work on a new project for their employer, running it through the gauntlet of the academy's courses on innovation.

For instance, Jeppe Schyth Olsen, marketing director for Middelfart Sparekasse, a bank in central Denmark, plans to create a subsidiary focusing on bank services that use technology to cater to urbanites. "We don't want to compete on price," Olsen says. "We need to differentiate."

Diversity in Students and Professors

Kirah is also mixing up the student body. The school wants to draw a cross-section of corporate staffers, from top and middle managers to engineers, designers, and sales staff. And while the first class is primarily made up of Danish executives, 180°academy hopes to recruit from well beyond the country's borders.

With its unusual curriculum, the school has already attracted a host of well-regarded educators. Top among them, perhaps, is Richard Pascale, author of Surfing the Edge of Chaos, who has taught at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, is an associate fellow at Britain's Oxford University and will be promoting a theory of "positive deviancy&—analyzing success stories that have deviated from the norm. Teng-Kee Tan, a professor and director of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a former executive at Electrolux, will help students understand how to bridge the gap between observation and anthropology and real world applications thereof. And Simona Maschi, a senior researcher at Milano Polytechnic University in Italy, will also be teaching there. "I've spent 15 years trying to convince companies that they needed to start schools to do this," Maschi says.

Greene is BusinessWeek's Seattle bureau chief.