Aarhus School of Business, Department of Economics

Global supply chains have come to play an important role in the implementation of business strategy in the 21st century. At the heart and core of supply chain management lies negotiations. Business standards and practices vary across countries and international negotiations often imply conducting critical negotiations in unfamiliar cultural settings.

Denmark, the Kingdom located in Northern Europe between the North Sea and the Baltics, is a wonderful country, and the friendly Danes a wonderful people. With its dependence on foreign trade, knack for innovation, and small open economy, Denmark has managed to carve out an internationally competitive position in an increasingly globalized world. A country others turn to in admiration and seek inspiration from when it comes to progress, sustainability, work-life balance, and well-being.
She is the home of happiness, equality, ‘hygge’ and fairy tales. She is the home of freedom, free speech, trust, tolerance, and fairness, as well as sympathy for the unfortunate, welfare, and foreign development aid.                    At the same time, she is the home of one of the most stringent immigration policies in Europe. An immigration policy, which even has been internationally criticized because it at times borders on what is seen as violation of basic human rights (e.g., Human Rights Watch, 2023). How can we make sense of this apparent paradox. The paradox between the freedom and peace-loving country of fairy tales, on the hand, and the conservative, fenced in, “shut border” nation, on the other. The paradox between a national culture, applauding the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), on the one hand, and where the same national culture                  to some extent complicates DEI, on the other hand.

While structures and reactivities of many small molecules can be computed efficiently and accurately using quantum chemical methods, heuristic approaches remain essential for modeling complex structures and large-scale chemical systems. Here, we present a heuristics-aided quantum chemical methodology applicable to complex chemical reaction networks such as those arising in cell metabolism and prebiotic chemistry. Chemical heuristics offer an expedient way of traversing high-dimensional reactive potential energy surfaces and are combined here with quantum chemical structure optimizations, which yield the structures and energies of the reaction intermediates and products. Application of heuristics-aided quantum chemical methodology to the formose reaction reproduces the experimentally observed reaction products, major reaction pathways, and autocatalytic cycles.