I've been through two Danish incubators run by the state.
In 2000 I founded a company that did social bookmarking/crowdsourcing of search that got founding from Teknologisk Innovation (http://tekinno.dk/ - link in Danish). They were, to say the least, absolutely terrible. The partner that was assigned to our company had no idea how the technology worked, had little business sense and no connections worth speaking of. I still vividly remember the conversation in the board room where he said he had a standard contract for cooperation between companies lying around that we could use. Everyone wondered how something like that could be standardised, and noone was surprised when he sent out a standard NDA. Apparently he didn't know the difference...
To their defense it should be said that this was ten years ago, and they had only started their incubator one year before, so maybe they've gotten better.
The second was with a company that I cofounded that ran an advertising network with a number of flatscreens hooked up to a server via the phone network, making it easy to update and send out new ads and news to the screens. This was initially founded by Symbion (http://symbion.dk/ - link in Danish). This is a seconed Danish staterun incubator. They were much much better than Teknologisk Innovation, but still not amazing in any way. Their contact network was fairly good, but they had no idea about technology and focused a lot on paperwork, contracts, milestones and other red tape. This was around 7 years ago.
The problem with these staterun incubators is that the people who run them and work there aren't entrepreneurs, they're basically state bureaucrats that got moved to an incubator. This means that they don't know a lot about technology and their processes are rigid and timeconsuming. To my knowledge they don't have much success. Unfortunately this is the main channel for funding in Denmark since we don't have a tradition of funding startups. Also, not a lot of people have the kind of money needed for investing, I guess that's the downside to a huge welfare state where the top tax bracket is 65%.
It's a pity since there are a lot of extremely competent programmers in Denmark (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, C++, the V8 Javascript engine, Google Maps and Google wave were all created or engineered by Danes - Not bad for a country with a population that's half of New York).
I think there's an open market for a good incubator in Denmark.
In 2000 I founded a company that did social bookmarking/crowdsourcing of search that got founding from Teknologisk Innovation (http://tekinno.dk/ - link in Danish). They were, to say the least, absolutely terrible. The partner that was assigned to our company had no idea how the technology worked, had little business sense and no connections worth speaking of. I still vividly remember the conversation in the board room where he said he had a standard contract for cooperation between companies lying around that we could use. Everyone wondered how something like that could be standardised, and noone was surprised when he sent out a standard NDA. Apparently he didn't know the difference...
To their defense it should be said that this was ten years ago, and they had only started their incubator one year before, so maybe they've gotten better.
The second was with a company that I cofounded that ran an advertising network with a number of flatscreens hooked up to a server via the phone network, making it easy to update and send out new ads and news to the screens. This was initially founded by Symbion (http://symbion.dk/ - link in Danish). This is a seconed Danish staterun incubator. They were much much better than Teknologisk Innovation, but still not amazing in any way. Their contact network was fairly good, but they had no idea about technology and focused a lot on paperwork, contracts, milestones and other red tape. This was around 7 years ago.
The problem with these staterun incubators is that the people who run them and work there aren't entrepreneurs, they're basically state bureaucrats that got moved to an incubator. This means that they don't know a lot about technology and their processes are rigid and timeconsuming. To my knowledge they don't have much success. Unfortunately this is the main channel for funding in Denmark since we don't have a tradition of funding startups. Also, not a lot of people have the kind of money needed for investing, I guess that's the downside to a huge welfare state where the top tax bracket is 65%.
It's a pity since there are a lot of extremely competent programmers in Denmark (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, C++, the V8 Javascript engine, Google Maps and Google wave were all created or engineered by Danes - Not bad for a country with a population that's half of New York).
I think there's an open market for a good incubator in Denmark.