The Digital North Denmark Programme -Promoting Regional Change?

The Digital North Denmark (DDN) was an IT programme running from 2000 to 2003 in the North Jutland County in Denmark with national government support of € 23 million. The Danish government initiated the programme with the aim of further strengthening regions with an already proven ICT capability (Dybkjær and Lindegaard, 1999, p.96-100). The declared approach was to build on the existing competencies in industry as well as at universities. The national government chose two regions – Ørestaden, a new concentration of knowledge-based institutions near Copenhagen Airport, and North Jutland. The Copenhagen programme was basically concentrated on, literally, construction of a new IT University, a new neighbouring science park and a new media centre for the public broadcaster, Danmarks Radio. The North Denmark programme was, on the other hand, organised as a large-scale experiment based on project-offers within four themes. The participants - meant to be project consortia of ideally private firms, public or private organisations as well as regional and municipal government bodies - could get a maximum national government support of one third of the total project sum.This chapter investigates how the profile of the programme changed from focusing on localised change targeting the producers of ICT in the region, to be initiated as a radical change project focusing on the users. In addition to the more historical accounts for DDN the actual implementation will also be analysed. The analyses of development perspectives for the regional ICT sector will focus on the participation of the university and the cluster.