The experiences from the Digital North Denmark

A variety of polices have in the recent years been used as tools for development of peripheral regions. In the late 1990s have policies for cluster development become popular and widely implemented. Especially policy programs focusing on creating or promoting clusters within the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector have been used with more or less dubious results. Some of the inspiration has come from the literature on clusters, regional innovation systems and learning regions, focusing on developing clusters and learning regions. The focus has been on network cooperation between firms and public organizations, and a common will in the community to give the region a lift in competencies. In this paper we analyze the Digital North Denmark (DDN) ICT policy program 2000-2003, initiated to build an ICT lighthouse and to promote the network society by developing the ICT sector in the peripheral region of North Denmark by building on the existing positive cooperation between the university, industry, science park and local government. But when it was implemented the goal had changed to create a learning region and diffuse ICT in the region. The cluster firms and the university were among the main arguments for establishing the program, but somehow they were largely missing as participants. Some of the large projects revealed a lack of cooperation between firms and public organizations, since it seemed that the common vision was not shared. It also became evident that it was problematic to carry out an ICT policy program, without having a general idea of how to continue the results of the program after the end of financial support in 2003. DDN was presented in 1999, when the ICT sector was booming, but implemented from late 2000, when the crisis in ICT sector had begun. Is it possible to build a regional ICT lighthouse? And did North Denmark become an ICT lighthouse? 1 Email: [email protected]