Denmark's creative consultancy companies, which assist companies to penetrate markets, enjoy a leading-edge position.

A new, international survey shows that Denmark is among the countries with most innovative consultancy companies, or concept design companies, relative to population size. Denmark has ten such companies - a lot for a small country such as Denmark. By comparison, London - with over 1½ times the population of Denmark - has only 17 such companies. These companies are characterised as providing assistance to other companies to renew their products or services by mixing methods from creative occupation, the financial world and social science, writes Danish daily Politiken.

"The relatively high number of Danish creative consultancy companies means that Denmark is well equipped to compete in the global marketplace, where creativity is more important than production costs," says development director Jørgen Rosted, who is behind the survey.

"The advantage of concept design is that it cannot - yet - be outsourced," explains Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, one of the world's most recognised concept design companies. "It is this special ability to create new ideas and be on the leading-edge in terms of, what companies should be looking for that is needed in new development. Any company can find a less expensive place to carry out the manual work. But in Denmark you can come up with new ideas as to what will meet the needs of the Danish market or the world market."

Concept design is one of the government's focus areas and the industry has expanded during the last couple of years. Whereas the design industry in general has shown an annual increase in turnover of 17 percent from 2002-2006, the ten Danish concept design companies had an average increase in turnover of 31 percent.

Innovation is a core element of the CBS Executive MBA and full-time MBA programme with specifically targeted modules on entrepreneurship and innovation.