Anders Bjarklev's 40th anniversary: ‘My experience of starting a business shaped my mission as President’

The problem was that no PhD students wanted to waste their time on the project. No colleagues were supportive.

“Innovation was not something that you should spend your working hours on,” recalls Anders Bjarklev. “It was deemed a waste of time.”

Only one PhD student—Jes Broeng—showed an interest. And when his calculations repeatedly contradicted all the textbook rules, Anders Bjarklev began to feel nervous. He saw two possible outcomes:

“Either our calculations were incorrect, and my colleagues would be proven right. Or perhaps we had struck gold.”

They found a group working in the same field at a university in the English city of Bath. Jes Broeng went to test their calculations in practice, and when he called Anders Bjarklev at home, it was with news that the media Ingeniøren later called ‘unthinkable’:

“It works! It works amazingly well!” he exclaimed on the phone. And then things took off.

Civil engineer John Heebøll, who had just been recruited by DTU to boost innovation at a new centre, saw the potential in the two entrepreneurs, and invested half of the modest DKK 100,000 he had been allocated.

“That was a lot of money back then,” says John Heebøll.

“There was virtually no capital available for innovation, so I took a big gamble because I believed in them.”

The money was used to write an international patent application, and DTU and the company NKT joined as founders. In 1999, this resulted in the formation of the high-tech company Crystal Fibre A/S.

The butterfly effect

Crystal Fibre became the first research-based company to have researchers, DTU and a company involved. But it was far from the last. Considering the technology behind Crystal Fibre, the career steps Anders Bjarklev later took can be described as a butterfly effect.

When the position as Provost at DTU was advertised in 2010, it was precisely the experience from founding Crystal Fibre that made Anders Bjarklev apply for the job. He had a mission: To spread innovation at DTU so that the resistance he himself had faced could be turned into progress. And when he got the job, he went straight to work:

“In 2010, only six startups emerged from DTU. So at the first board meeting, I suggested that we put a zero behind it,” he recalls.

When he became President the following year, in 2011, he followed up with concrete initiatives to realise the goal. In his first anniversary speech as President, he said:

“Through its example, DTU wants to be known in Denmark as a university of innovation. Specifically, this means that we must develop a wide range of activities to accomplish this goal.”

That same year, he hired DTU’s first Director for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Senior Vice President Marianne Thellersen. She remembers how, shortly after being appointed, she was introduced to the idea of creating a forum for students, researchers, start-ups, and investors, where everyone could work together across the various departments to develop new and innovative technologies.

"It was an experiment that still inspires me today," says Marianne Thellersen.

The idea became a decision, thanks to Anders Bjarklev's wife Araceli Bjarklev encouraging him to go for it, and Mikkel Sørensen was hired to realise the vision. According to Mikkel Sørensen, he was given the freedom to try, fail and try again. He remembers that the newly appointed President gave him the following words:

“As long as no one gets hurt and you and I don't go to jail, everything is fine.”

In 2013, this resulted in a breakthrough in the Danish university world: the internationally recognised innovation hub DTU Skylab was born.

New goals

Anders Bjarklev’s focused approach to promoting innovation - first through his own work as a researcher and later at management level - has left a clear mark. Both at DTU and in society at large.

Crystal Fibre is now known as NKT Photonics and employs several hundred people. Co-founder Jes Broeng is a serial entrepreneur and director of DTU's centre for technology and entrepreneurship, DTU Entrepreneurship, which researches and teaches tomorrow's tech talents. And Anders Bjarklev’s own supervision of up to 70 students and PhDs has resulted in developing knowledge that is making a real difference, both in Denmark and internationally.

One of them is Jacob L. Philipsen, who is now CEO of the company Advalight and co-founder of the scaleup company Norlase, which makes portable lasers for treating eye diseases. He describes Anders Bjarklev's guidance as ‘crucial’ to his later career choice.

"I was actually the nerdy researcher type, but Anders opened my eyes to the commercial path. If I hadn't met him, I wouldn't have ended up commercialising research from DTU," he says.

The fact that Anders Bjarklev himself ended up as President was similarly a consequence of the experiences he had as a company founder. They shaped his mission.

Today, he is proud of the innovation ecosystem created at DTU, which gives students and researchers the optimal framework to innovate and deliver excellent research.

"It is their efforts that make DTU internationally recognised today," says Anders Bjarklev.

"But," he emphasises, "this is not a farewell salute."

In February 2025, DTU's Board of Directors decided to extend Anders Bjarklev as President for a three-year period. This has led to a whole new goal.

“My next goal is for DTU to hatch 200 new start-ups a year. And that for every 100 of them, 10 must be scalable," he says, elaborating:

“The mission is actually quite straightforward: We need to bring as many good ideas and solutions as possible from the auditoriums and laboratories out into the world where they can make a difference. Or as H.C. Ørsted put it when he founded DTU almost 200 years ago: ‘We must utilise natural and technical science - for the benefit of society as a whole.’