NOVO NORDISK CASE
HOW DOES NOVO NORDISK ATTRACT GLOBAL KEY COMPETENCES?
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ovo Nordisk is a good example of a company who, in spite of an extremely strong position and image in its home country, continually must challenge itself on where to find the best competences within selected niche areas.
Novo Nordisk is one of the world’s leading companies within diabetes treatment based on a wide assortment of diabetes products. With a turnover of more than DKK 60 billion in 2010 and more than 30,500 employees, Novo Nordisk is absolutely one of the leading companies in Denmark. Of the 30,500 employees, approximately 44% are situated in Denmark and 56% in the rest of the world. Today, Novo Nordisk is a large workplace in Denmark and employs more than 13,000 people. However, it is expected that the future growth is found outside the country’s boarders – not solely measured in turnover but also in relation to the number of employees. In terms of sales and production, Novo Nordisk has a highly global set-up. The company has subsidiaries and offices in 76 countries and production plants in seven countries. High-technology companies like Novo Nordisk have to be able to attract and retain highly educated specialists. There is indeed a long tradition of attracting good employees for research and development in the diabetes industry where Novo Nordisk has taken the lead. But along with other companies, Novo Nordisk has to consider if the need for specially trained people can be met in Denmark and if you can improve your competitive situation by outsourcing and/or expanding to foreign countries.
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t the moment, Novo Nordisk is expanding. Today, there are 3,500 employees in the area of research, and this number is expected to reach 5,000 in 2020. It will be a global expansion including Beijing (research activities), Seattle (biopharma and target discovery) and India (back-office with support functions on patent and IT). Måløv is still expected to be the head office of research in Novo Nordisk, but the structure and the further ongoing development of Måløv continue to demand extensive international recruitment. When Novo Nordisk opened its new centre for inflammation research back in September 2009, Seattle, and not Denmark, was chosen. “Seattle is a research centre for biotechnology, and by placing our new centre for inflammation research here, we get the opportunity to attract top researchers and to co-operate with highly qualified partners,” Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, inter-company research director at Novo
Nordisk says. “We hope that by investing in the early research, we will be able to find the underlying reasons for different inflammatory conditions and develop new treatments for these diseases.” The research activities in Seattle will supplement the biopharmaceutical research activities in progress in Novo Nordisk’s research units in Måløv in Denmark and in Beijing in China. For a company like Novo Nordisk, it is of great importance to get access to the right competences – and keep close to an existing research centre for biotechnology. Especially since the planned growth requires a need for hiring a number of new employees within widely different areas. These employees cannot all be found in Denmark, and it is also not possible to attract foreign labour to fill these vacancies. Novo Nordisk found that about half of the researchers, who came here during the previous three-year researcher tax rules system, left after the three years. Therefore, Novo Nordisk is working with 14 others of the country’s biggest companies on creating conditions for foreign labour in Denmark that are as attractive as possible. This fight takes place not least in the network Consortium for Global Talent where the 15 companies have been successful in removing many of the barriers that were thought to have prevented the well-qualified labour in coming to Denmark – and not least stay here.
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herefore, it is necessary for Novo Nordisk continuously to work with a globalisation strategy in relation to employees – that is which competences and how many are needed and where can they be found.