As Copenhagen Economics turns 25, our Managing Partner Henrik Ballebye Okholm reflects on the last quarter of a century of our company and economic consulting more widely, as well as the opportunities the future might bring.
March 2025
With Copenhagen Economics (CE) marking a quarter of a century in March this year, it feels like a good time to reflect on what the last 25 years have taught us, both about our own organisation and the wider field of economic consulting. That time has seen the company develop beyond recognition. We now find ourselves in an exciting position with possibilities for great change and new ways of doing things.
When I first joined Copenhagen Economics 21 years ago, it felt like stepping into a startup environment. I believe I was the tenth employee, and our Business Support Team consisted of just one person. Initially, it was just two founders and a small team who could always interact directly with them, so there was little structure and hardly any procedures in place. During my time here, I have witnessed the organisation grow from a startup into a fully-fledged company.
A key figure in this transformation has been Claus Kastberg Nielsen, one of the founders of CE and the one I have known best. Claus has significantly influenced our organisation in terms of our ethos and emphasis on teamwork. He has been a scout for most of his life, and it is quite evident how this has shaped the way our company operates – the self-confidence, sense of belonging, and teamwork that scouting instils are also integral to how we do business.
I joined CE straight from academia, where I was an assistant professor. Having been a scout myself for twenty years, the emphasis on teamwork (which was a stark contrast to life in academia) was a major attraction for me. I was also keen to work at CE to have a more direct audience for my work; joining CE, I knew that my work would be valued, as clients who invest in our services must have a good idea about how they are going to use our expertise.
When I started working at the company, I was extremely shy and introverted. I was only concerned with what was right and having strong arguments. But being a part of an organisation where I could collaborate with a talented and ambitious team (and one that also likes spending time together) allowed me to thrive as an economist in an environment where teamwork was valued more. In many ways, my specific journey mirrors the ethos of our company; it is not only the hard facts we give to our clients that are important, but the compelling stories that emerge from good communication and being a part of a team with a trusting culture.
Henrik at the 2024 CE Spring Summit
A fundamental change we have gone through at CE is the shift from an entrepreneurial company to a more professional one. This process has seen us professionalise the organisation and build structures in the way we work, ensuring consistency in how we approach each project. Over the past 25 years, we have transformed into a multiple partner company and, in the process of the company becoming larger and spreading out, we have had to develop proper structures. Again, Claus was instrumental in this as he took a risk and gave significant responsibility to a group of relatively inexperienced consultants at the time. Despite his experience and initial role in securing our projects, he treated us as partners and facilitated this transition quite early in our history.
What is interesting is that it is in the last five years that we have experienced the largest transformation. While clear storytelling has always been a big part of what we do, our emphasis on building a truly commercial mindset has been a more recent development. We have had to balance our passion for economics with a clear focus on value creation in order to build a sound and growing company. As a result, our organisational identity and the nature of our work have been more defined, offering employees better career opportunities. We have become better at distinguishing between what our company needs to have as opposed to what is simply nice to have.
The amount of training we provide at CE, particularly in communication, shows its importance to our company. But, over the last few years, we have also developed a clearer idea of what our service areas can offer and what we can help our clients with; we have built upon our culture of trust and communication to improve our commercial mindset and truly cement the processes we work with. We can see this development in our company culture through what are now our values and strategy: from aspiring to be a truly international workplace and having a team-based, flat hierarchy rooted in Nordic traditions, to our emphasis on a foundation and culture built on trust.
An aspect of our transformation that I have particularly enjoyed witnessing – and hope to see even more of in the future – is internationalisation. It was during Covid that this really took off, as, when you are sitting in front of a screen, where you are geographically placed can be irrelevant. It integrated the company in a completely new way. CE has gone from a predominantly Danish company operating in the Nordics to a highly international one with far more clients abroad and over half of our revenue now coming from outside the Nordic countries.
And it is not just the client base that has become more international – our workforce has also become increasingly diverse, with colleagues with over twenty different nationalities. A few years ago, I was leading a business unit where we had six nationalities, earning us the nickname ‘United Nations’. I absolutely love that. It makes our working life so much richer that we have colleagues from so many different cultural backgrounds. We have cultivated a much wider and more inclusive culture, significantly enhanced by the diverse perspectives brought in by our international board members and the diversity of our workforce. This, I believe, truly enriches our understanding of the different markets we operate in. I am optimistic that our commitment to diversity and inclusion will continue to strengthen our performance in the coming years.
Henrik gives a speech at CE’s 25th anniversary celebration on 17 March 2025
I feel pride when I look at where CE finds itself and the influence we have as a company. Every day, we provide decision-makers with the hard facts and clear stories they need to make better decisions. Another major change is doing policy work for public clients to increasingly working for private ones. The work we do is increasingly case-specific, advising in relation to conflicts between companies or between a company and a regulator. I find these contracts highly motivating and exciting to work on, as there is a lot at stake for the private companies and it is easier for them to make decisions quickly.
My first project at Copenhagen Economics involved working on a competition case using microeconomics, which was then quite new in Denmark. That is just one area where you can really see the positive effect we have had on societies by providing decision-makers with sound economic analysis: there is now a far stronger emphasis on and understanding of effects on competition in competition cases and mergers, rather than relying on simple form-based rules. This means that economic evidence plays a larger and larger role, leading to better decisions targeting the behaviours and mergers that really do harm competition, instead of sanctioning behaviours that are not harmful but just appear on a blacklist.
CE has been able to master different industries to react to the market. To name just a few examples, we are now experts in healthcare & life sciences, competition economics, and climate economics. These days, meeting the needs of clients means working with the best and brightest consultants, having a culture of constant improvement and maintaining high ambitions. When I think of just a few examples of how our work is making an impact, I can see that our analysis of the need for State aid and its effects has led to State aid being spent more wisely; our cost-benefit analysis using real-world evidence has led to a better use of pharmaceuticals; we are seeing more value for money with the green transition due to better-designed policies; and more efficient markets as regulation adapts to meet todays’ needs. We have seen the 100-year-old principles for price regulation of international mail abolished, and our quantification work even caught the interest of the White House!
In this era of rapid technological change, it is a pleasure to work with colleagues doing economics in new ways, and this is something I can only see continuing in years to come. It has always been the case that hard facts are essential when working on projects, but during my early years in consulting, doing econometrics was rarer. Performing this kind of statistical analysis was far more costly, and I remember a time when we had a computer in a closet running simulations for three weeks to produce one graph! Quantitative methods can now be performed more easily and at a faster rate, making them a much larger part of consulting. The use of AI is significantly impacting our industry. It has enabled faster and larger-scale quantitative work and has led to increased internationalisation of the field by significantly reducing the language barrier. For example, large reports can now be translated quickly and with a high level of accuracy, making them accessible for research. All of this means that, over time, we have seen a shift towards much bigger projects and far more quantitative work.
In the face of change, it gives me reassurance to go back to our primary purpose as an organisation. Copenhagen Economics exists to provide decision-makers the hard facts and clear stories they need to make better choices for the benefit of society. As societies around the world face new decisions in the future, I am certain that what we do is still going to be just as relevant in 25 years’ time.
Henrik Ballebye Okholm is the Managing Partner of Copenhagen Economics and a member of the CE Board. Read more about Henrik here.
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