Copenhagen to Chicago

Hello everybody! If you landed here, chances are you wanted to check out who Bjoern is, exactly. Well, look no further! For starters: to the right you see myself and my partner in crime.
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I'm from the rural town of Borup, approx. 30 miles outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. Having an idea that I wanted to be in business, maybe even abroad, I pursued my undergraduate in International Business and Master's in Business Administration at Copenhagen Business School while working full time. Here, I was fortunate to try out a study abroad/teaching appointment at Purdue University which was an absolute success.

Therefore, I decided to pursue my Ph.D. in Organizational Communication and Open Digital Innovation and gained immense experience in modern analytics and research, informed by design thinking. This resulted in multiple presentations at high-profile conferences as well as publications on e.g. how to make online hackathons generate more complete app solutions for the public, using transparency as a design choice. Ultimately, my dissertation examined a massive dataset from a Danish public organization to determine which types of communicative actions among front-line workers were more likely to result in other workers adopting proposed ideas. Turns out that if you simplify the idea, provide a step-by-step description as well as an example, other people are way more likely to adopt your idea (not taking into account organizational hierarchy, of course).

As fate had it, I met Maria, who would later become my wife. After she got a job in Chicago, there was no hesitation in looking into the vibrant tech scene for my "post-PhD" job. This became at Powered by Action (PbA), a nonprofit that offers technology to other nonprofits that allows them to digitize their services and expand their offerings on tablets, phones, and the web. My logical first step was to help develop and firm up the roadmap for the app suite, embedding it with a UI that is to the user experience what a good "tell it to your grandmother" instruction manual is to, well, your grandmother: fun, easy, and educational. With the product in hand, my next big undertaking was building a process for white-labeling our app so that already recognized nonprofits could continue to leverage their brand, which, 10+ white labels later, can be done in less than 2 weeks. Needless to say, we've scaled quite a bit. I am happy to have been a part of this journey.

Fast forward 'til today, I've taken my skills to help build technology that is fun, easy to use, and educational to the point that it empowers people to grasp something that is traditionally complicated such as, say, investing your money well and saving for the future. That prompted my transition to Allstate, specifically in their product innovation department. Why? Because it holds an incredible opportunity for "funifucation". Insurance isn't seen as fun, the experience isn't typically fun and insurance in itself is a complicated product but everybody should have it. On this incredible team I am working with massive datasets and literature and using it to build products that put the customer first and make sure that people get the insurance that's right for them and with as little friction as possible. Needless to say it isn't easy - but it is an awesome everyday motivator.

I am always happy to connect, so feel free to email me - I'm around!