COLUMN: You cannot have security if you cannot produce it yourself

This is an opinion piece; the views expressed in the column are the writer’s own. 

The other day, as I sat in the Common Hall at Christiansborg during the conference “From Research to the Factory Floor”, organised by the Confederation of Danish Industry, Aalborg University and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, I was reminded of something that those of us at a technical faculty often take for granted: That there is a long way from an idea to a product – and that engineers are the ones who bridge that gap. Denmark’s imports from China are at an extraordinarily high level, and according to Ursula von der Leyen, Chair of the European Commission, Europe’s trade deficit amounts to €1 billion every day. A report from the think tank DEA shows that public funding for production technology has fallen from DKK 2.1 billion in 2012 to DKK 1 billion in 2024. In other words, we are doing little as a nation to strengthen the competitiveness of our own industries. 

Critical technology

At the conference, there was broad agreement that Denmark must be competitive in the European market, and that robots, automation and AI must make their way onto the much-discussed factory floor if they are to generate competitive strength. But the further the debate progressed, the more it struck me how rarely we talk about who is actually going to translate research into operations. We talk about technology and innovation as though a scientific finding published in a journal somehow magically turns into a production line in Brande or Bjerringbro. 

It doesn't. What is needed is a new generation of talented engineers. And in the debate panel, I was backed by Mikkel Haarder, deputy director of the Confederation of Danish Industry, who argued that production technology should be prioritised as a critical technology alongside artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Our conclusion was that the development of production technology is essential if Denmark and Europe are to turn new knowledge into jobs, green solutions, supply security and increased resilience. 

Spokesperson for research Trine Bramsen (Social Democrats) argued that research into production itself receives far too little attention. Former Minister for Industry, Business and Financial Affairs Simon Kollerup (Social Democrats) put it even more directly: We need to move more research results onto the factory floor.

Minds, hands – and resilience

We must remember where we come from. Around the turn of the millennium, we told ourselves that Denmark should become a knowledge society. The future lay in ideas and knowledge, and the physical and noisy could be outsourced. We were to make our living with our minds, not with our hands.

The Covid crisis punctured that narrative. You cannot have security if you cannot produce it yourself. Resilience only arises when someone dares to invest in an invention, test it, produce and sell it – and when there are people with the technical skills to make it work. The companies that grew were often those that never completely let go of production, but instead automated it and made it smarter. Today, Denmark is a manufacturing country by virtue of its technological research.

That realisation has taken hold in political circles, but it has yet to be reflected in the way we talk about the role of universities. We celebrate basic research and commercial success stories, but the link between the two, the crucial translation of knowledge into application, rarely receives the same recognition. That is where we need to take action. 

We must not forget the groundwork

It is fine – yes, actually necessary – that Denmark is investing billions in future potential within quantum and space research. But let's be honest about the fact that these investments will only turn into concrete jobs on the factory floor in the long run. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

In the short term, other fields are more important for production and resilience, and here our own region already possesses real strength: We are Denmark’s original manufacturing region, complemented by strong positions in food production and water technology. These are fields where research can quickly create an effect throughout Denmark, not just in the largest cities. Because innovation is not just the glamorous leap; it is also the unnoticed work of laying the stones one by one. The groundwork. That is something we should remind politicians of as they head into the autumn negotiations at Christiansborg on the research reserve funds and the Finance Act. 

This text is machine translated and post-edited by Mie Skov Jeppesen.