Minister Løhde, Ambassador Sands, Mayors of Rebild and Aalborg, Friends from the Rebild Society, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak at this day of celebration.  I am very happy to be here. I just returned home after 4 years as Denmark’s representative on the West coast of the USA, as Consul General and as head of our Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. 

It is nice to be home in Denmark … to meet family and friends - but I still have to say… I MISS CALIFORNIA AND THE USA - I miss the drive and the energy, I miss the can-do attitude and I miss the eagerness to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges.  

Not to mention the food, the wine, the basketball – go Warriors!- and the awesome nature of California …I miss it all.So, I was very happy - and proud - when Lars called and asked if I would speak here today.

Thank you for asking Lars

This is a wonderful day to celebrate the important values we share, and our long collaboration; a long-term affair going way back and with strong perspectives for the future.

And as in any good marriage, there’s still much we can learn from each other.  On innovation and how we manage the great disruptive changes ahead of us.

The values of freedom and democracy, the culture and the history we share are part of the dreams that have drawn so many to the US through the years – including quite a few of my own ancestors.

Two of those were both named Albert.

My great-grandfather, sea captain Albert Nicolai Christensen, set foot on Ellis Island some 100 years ago...… Never to be heard from again. He disappeared.  But some of us in the family still have high hopes of an unknown rich uncle in America. 

So; now that I have this opportunity – I’d like to reach out to any rich descendants of Albert Christensen in the US, who might hear this:  Please come forward! The family in Denmark would like to talk to you.---

A little bit earlier, the other Albert, Albert Theilgaard - a young Danish engineer, was freezing his ass of in a tent in Greenland. Albert was also my great grandfather.Albert was 22 years old and penniless. He had made his way through engineering school teaching younger students and had earned his position in an expedition to the Viking villages of Eastern Greenland, through hard work. Sometime during his stay in Greenland, he developed an idea for how to regenerate rubber, through a process involving potassium acid and heat.

Safely back in Copenhagen he persuaded a group of Danish business people to back his idea, and especially to support his travel to the United States, and in February 1900, he obtained the US patent for the process. 

Albert then sold the rights to exploit the patent in the US to an American company. He then stayed in the United States two more years in order to help establish production there. For the money he gained from this, he returned to Denmark, where he founded the company, Codan Gummi, with production in Køge.Albert used his innovation and his drive to seek funding in the USA in order to grow and scale his idea and startup.  And in the process of commercializing his innovation, he founded and developed a company generating growth and jobs in both the USA and in Denmark.

A good example of how we all benefit from Innovation and international collaboration.  

And a reminder that the Startup adventure isn’t new.

Their stories made an impression on me, and I definitely shared Alberts& Alberts urge to go west.I grew very much up with Rebild and the USA. I played baseball, and my music was almost all American – anything from Springsteen to Neil Young or Jackson.

I loved American movies, the culture and American ideals. Both my sisters went to exchange programs in the USA. And I’m just old enough to remember being together in an alliance in the last days of the cold war as a young officer. 

One of the things that I always wanted to experience in my life was living in America. So for me it was a dream come true, when I got the chance to live and work in California to head the team at the Danish Innovation Center in Palo Alto. The center is the Danish Bridge into Silicon Valley helping universities, startups and large corporation learn and work with the tech and innovation in Silicon Valley. The center is a collaboration between the Danish Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is in itself an example of successful innovation.

Four years ago – almost to the date - I moved to Silicon Valley.  The world’s tech capital. 

I was energized and in awe of all the things to learn from my new life among robots, Googlers, Elon Musk, flying cars and artificial intelligence.

Never mind strange everyday occurrences, like- When I opened my local bank account and had to accept the offer of a good old-fashioned checkbook …  Or when I had to spend two hours in line in the waiting room of some worn out public office to get my social security number.I decided not mention to anyone there, that we have generally stopped using checkbooks years ago in Denmark and that we generally deal with public registration through the internet.I accepted local culture, and I was rewarded. 

The old-fashioned checkbook and the long waiting line didn’t reflect life in Silicon Valley in the least bit.I met a wonderland full of Intelligent and well-educated people; Curious, inclusive, open-minded, kind and sharing.  Full of ideas on how to make the world a better place. Dreaming big, and eager to develop and share those ideas. And they do make amazing advances – self driving cars, DNA sequencing, artificial intelligence and scores of intelligent new solutions to big problemsLadies and Gentlemen,

 We probably all share the feeling of being on a high-speed train into the future.A brave new world, full of opportunities to solve many of the problems facing us today.  And with lots of dilemmas and choices to make.And there is much we should all learn from Silicon Valley.It is Curiosity.

In Silicon Valley people always have time to listen to your idea. Always interested in how you can think up better solutions to new and old problems.It is the open attitude to networking,to share, help and support, to “Pay it Forward” as they say. To give to your network because you know someone might benefit. It is the culture of hard work. To be ready to stay in the lab, the startup or wherever, long after hours. To always go the extra mile.

But first, it is the acceptance of risk. You have to risk to win big, and if you fail it’s because you had the balls to try. Therefor failure is not stigmatizing to the same extend as it is in the country of Jante.All those who went west 200 years before me, who had to fight the wilderness and not a waiting line, really did manage to define an innovative culture for generations to come.

And we really can learn a lot from it.

But the most important learning is that we are and must be part of the world to take part in this amazing progress. 

And Alberts journey is exactly as the founders of today.   The process now is just a lot cleaner than Alberts idea of boiling old rubber in open acid tubs. The startups today mainly work with data and smart algorithms.And there are many examples of how Danish startups have generated growth and jobs in Denmark and in the US through this journey.

The Faroese Dane, Heini Zachariasen, founded an internet platform for rating and selling wine –Vivino– through his own realization that he needed some sort of guidance when he was shopping wine for dinner guests in the super market Saturday afternoon.  Today they are based in San Francisco and Copenhagen and have more than 30 million users world wide.

Or Mikkel Svane and his team, who founded his customer support software company, Zendesk, in a kitchen in Østerbro, went on the stock exchange in New York, and now runs a global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a team there and in Denmark.

Or Christian and Mikkel and their team, who are simplifying the way companies buy, pay and connect from San Francisco, Denmark and China, with their company Tradeshift, founded as they were leaving jobs in the Ministry of Science.

And not just young men and women. Even a group of Grumpy Old Men from Aalborg are doing it in the growing business of small scale satellites with GOM-space.So, there’s much we can learn about innovation from the US – there is much good collaboration, and there is a strong basis for even more. There’s another example of this.

Actually, the United States had an impact on the formulation of the Danish Free Trade Policy.  150 years ago, Denmark was, as other European countries, affected by the low price of grain from the US. The US had very effectively made use of the industrial revolution – the Industry 1.0 - to improve the output of agricultural production and could sell grain at prices much lower than European farmers could in those days.

Most of the European countries – with Bismarcks Iron and Rye tariffs as the illustrious example - set up tariff barriers to prevent the import of grain. But not Denmark. Denmark accepted that American grain was cheaper than Danish. And we let it into our market. And we made the very rational decision to feed the cheap grain to the pigs to sell bacon to the United Kingdom at a higher margin. Danish Free Trade Policy was born – with the help of the US – creating a win win win situation – not least for the British who got the good Danish Bacon.

SO Ladies and Gentlemen,We stand at the threshold of an amazing new world in which tech can help us solve so many of the challenges we face. Data and artificial intelligence gives us better diagnosis and better treatments for diseases and technologies are augmenting human abilities in all kinds of areas.This is happening at an amazing pace – in itself a challenge to society. How do we keep up? how do we navigate? How do we make the right choices about how to use these technologies?

The answer is more international collaboration. We need to collaborate even more and even closer in order to manage these new challenges.

First of all, we need to collaborate on education. Tech developments will change the way we work and the way we organize our labor markets in the coming years. We have to learn how to work alongside robots, but especially we will have to look at how we learn andhowwe keep on learning throughout our lives in order to be able to adapt and be relevant. This requires collaboration on education and learning.

Secondly, we will need to collaborate on how we manage radical change.The pace of development is so high now that our societies cannot really keep up. We will all face all kinds of new questions on howwe collaborate with robots, howwe deal with self-driving cars and howwe use data. We are just beginning to see the outline of some of these questions.We will need discussions and collaborations on ethics, on how we legislate and on trust. Today we are gathered to celebrate US/Danish collaboration. And as in any good marriage it takes two to tango. 

I have outlined some of the things we can learn from the US. When people ask, what the US can learn from us, I often point to lifelong learning and trust as Danish specialties.Trust is key to the world-renowned Danish happiness.

So maybe it is time we dust of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard.  

They both have something to say on these issues.Maybe we can use their legacy to help develop how we manage the challenges of our bright future, and maybe Denmark really has something to offer in this development.Grundtvig’s importance for the development of the concept of lifelong learning and for the development of the cooperative models here, are directly applicable and relevant.  Søren Kierkegaard’s teaching on morals and ethics are important, as we today will have to navigate new and challenging questions relating to tech and new discoveries.

As two rich open democracies, the USA and Denmark stand in front of a joint voyage of discovery. It has only just started. So many can benefit from the opportunities from tech, but it is also infinitely important, that we discuss how we want to go about this - how we want our democracies to develop.

So,straight out of Silicon Valley – speaking in celebration of the birth of the USA – I have a few important things to consider as you later today drive home from Rebild.

We stand at the threshold of very transformative times full of exiting new opportunities.  

To make the most of this we need a common focus:

We need to shape up and learn – every dayWe need to strengthen transatlantic and international collaboration. 

We have to consider how we lead and manage radical change.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen – Thanks for listening. Cherish the good and strong traditions we have for collaboration – take good care of it - we will need it. God fest !