Morten Albæk will be new Chairman of the Board

The choice of chairman seems to be the perfect match. He is a philosopher, author and CEO of the consultancy company Voluntas, which provides professional feedback to businesses, leaders and governments. According to Morten Albæk the advice offered by his company focuses on ”how to create, adapt and drive a meaningful organisation, brand, planet, and society.” The word ‘meaningful’ encapsulates the very core of Design School Kolding’s education and research: That design must be meaningful to people and to the environment.

With his broad leadership experience from wind turbine factory Vestas, Danske Bank (Denmark’s largest financial corporation), and as Founder and CEO of the consultancy company Voluntas, Morten Albæk’s knowledge about the business world is substantial. In addition he has extensive knowledge about the world of academia, and for a number of years, he was Honorary Professor of Philosophy and Education at Aalborg University.

- Morten Albæk is the obvious choice as chairman of Design School Kolding’s board. He has brought philosophy down to earth and made it relevant, not least due to his many years in the corporate world. Throughout his career he has managed to break the boundaries between humanities and hardcore business. This is exactly what we need to do within the design profession. With his strong communications skills I’m confident Morten Albæk will be able to bridge the gap between the business world and our young design students and thus strengthen the effect of our most important job: to make our students relevant to businesses and vice versa, says new Vice Chairman of the Board, Merete Due Paarup, who steps down after one year as chairman and happily passes on the baton to Morten Albæk.

Design School Kolding’s Board of Directors is comprised of representatives from the design industry as well as the regional and local political scene. This combination of local roots along with a national and international outlook will ensure continuity and create the best possible framework for an ambitious strategy going forward.

- I look very much forward to my new role as Chairman of the Board at Design School Kolding, which I consider to be among the world’s most interesting design universities. Together with the Board I will work to democratise design and consequently make design a fundamental competency in any progressive company and organisation. My ambition is also to offer Design School Kolding’s new visionary rector, Lene Tanggaard, the best possible support so that we, together with employees and students, can make the school one of the world leaders in design education and research, says Morten Albæk.

About Morten Albæk 

• Founder & CEO, Voluntas; a consultancy specialising in “advising companies, foundations, owners, boards, leaders and governments on how to create, adapt and drive a meaningful culture, brand and society.” (2015-)  
• Chief Marketing Officer, Vestas (2009-2015)
• SVP for the department for Idea Generation & Innovation, Danske Bank (2002-2008)
• Selected five times for the Internationalist’s Top 100 Most Influential CMOs (2011-2015)
• Shortlisted as one of only two Europeans on the ‘20 Inspiring Marketers of the First 20 Years of the 21st Century’ (2020)
• Author of four bestselling books, most recently ’One Life: How we forgot to live meaningful lives’ (2018), which came out in English in October 2019 and will soon come out in South Korea, Ukraine, France, Russia, Norway, Serbia, Germany in 2020-2021.
• Honorary Professor in Philosophy & Education at Aalborg University 2008-2019
• MA in History and Philosophy