Time flies when you are having fun: Shortly after the last blogpost, I managed to get an internship at the Danish trade association for design companies, Danish Design Association. The internship turned into a student job when I started on my masters, and ended with a position as project manager.

My time at Danish Design Association (now Design denmark) has been very exciting: I have met and talked to numerous kind and inspiring people within the Danish design sector, arranged many small events and conferences, played a key role of keeping the organisation running through two CEO changes and one major merger with the competing organisation Danish Designers. Following the merger, I was responsible for finding, buying, designing and implementing the organisation’s new member-database, and subsequently extended the functionality of the member system to include more efficient handling of event-signup, online membership applications, relevant business statistics etc.

During my time at Design denmark, I finished my masters in Management of Creative Business Processes at Copenhagen Business School. With this master you can focus on helping conventional profit-oriented businesses become more creative, innovative and competitive, or managing creative companies, improving business models and profitability. Working at Design denmark gave me ample opportunity to encounter design service firms and get acquainted with the kind of challenges they typically face. Being highly interested in this kind of companies, I wrote most of my papers on these challenges, finishing off with a thesis interviewing CEOs of some of the most succesful design service firms in Denmark, and developing a model for how design service firms can professionalise marketing and sales effort, which non-designers are most relevant to hire, and how to use them most effectively.