The company was founded by Øivind Bjørnson and Fred Ingebrigtsen. Øivind Bjørnson was the Managing Director, a consultant, and was responsible for professional knowledge until 2007, when Ingrid Ottesen took over the MD role. With a master’s degree in leading change, and experience from a wide range of demanding leadership posts and project work in the public and private sectors, she had a good basis on which to lead the work of taking Bjørnson from an office community to a company. During this time, work began on further developing a performance culture at Bjørnson, based on the core values of professional knowledge, commitment, profitability, and trust.    
 
Bjørnson has long traditions in terms of social responsibility, and is engaged with multiple charitable bodies and organisations. It is both enriching and meaningful to be able to combine support for a good cause, by building networks and providing specialist skills. We currently have long-term sponsorship agreements with Viking FC, Bryne FC, Cancer-Care Rogaland (KOR), Arctic Sense, and Stavanger Konserthus. 
 
A number of strategic investments and measures were adopted during the period 2008 - 2012, in order to position the company for further growth. Since 2008 we have been qualified in Achilles as a supplier to the oil and energy sector. That year, Øivind Bjørnson also became a specialist in work and organisational psychology. This choice lay the foundation for systematic skills development and an obligatory specialisation programme run by NPF/IAP for all psychologists at Bjørnson. In August 2008, Björnson Organisationspsyokologerna AB was founded in Sweden, as a 100%-owned daughter company of Bjørnson AS. In spring 2009, Bjørnson entered into an exclusive collaboration with Hogrefe, Europe’s leading supplier of clinical and organisational-psychology tests. Bjørnson standardised and introduced the performance-motivation test AMI for use in the Norwegian market. In the spring of 2012, Øivind Bjørnson received the Inspiration Prize from the Rogaland Psychologists Association. In the summer of 2012, one of our staff, Dorothee Storch, received her doctorate in performance motivation - AMI. The doctorate was financed by Innovation Norway and Bjørnson. In 2016, Bjørnson entered into an exciting collaboration with Holter Consulting in Denmark, developing the Executive Presence in leadership development.  
 
In 2009, Bjørnson administered their first Rogaleder leadership survey in collaboration with the Stavanger Regional Business Association and the BI Norwegian Business School in Stavanger. The survey was repeated in 2012 and in 2014/15. A new Rogaleder leadership survey is planned for the future, to provide important insights both for businesses and for the region.  
 
In May 2010, the Bjørnson Psychology Centre was established, offering psychological consultations, and sessions on stress mastery and conflict resolution. Ane Johnsen Lien, a specialist in adult clinical psychology, was appointed as the centre’s specialist leader. The KOR/FIT tool was employed to strengthen user participation and to hone psychological consultations. We continue to offer psychological consultations to the business market,  delivered via our subcontractors.   
 
The Bjørnson Conference – a conference about leadership, aimed at top executives – took place for the first time in 2012. Since then, it has established its position as an attractive meeting place for top executives in the public and private sectors. The first Bjørnson Conference, entitled “How do the best leaders lead?”, took place at the Stavanger Konserthus, where 60 personally-invited top executives gathered to meet. Solfrid Flateby from the Reitan Group and Tom Georg Olsen from Miles were both lecturers and prizewinners for the topic “Great place to work”.  Since then, a number of inspiring lecturers have visited the conference, building its reputation as a professional and enriching event. The Bjørnson Conference was carried out for the seventh time in the autumn of 2018, with over 130 top executives attending, to discuss the topic “Leadership that provides results!”. The Corona pandemic put a stopper on the 2020 conference, but it will return in November of 2022, with the title: “For leaders who go in front”. Here we will be looking outwards and forwards, allowing ourselves to be challenged and inspired by talks from Mariana Mazzucato, Per-Espen Stoknes, and others.    
 
Since 2001, Bjørnson can look back on a period of positive growth and development, in which we have strengthened our position as an attractive collaborative partner for our customers, and as a professional body in leadership and organisational psychology. An important driver of our development has been significant and systematic investment in Bjørnson’s own organisation, in the form of developments in skills, technology, leadership, and products and services. The investments benefit staff and customers, make the company more robust, and enable us to handle ever more demanding commissions with a high degree of customer satisfaction. Since 2016, we have been methodically working to understand how we can supply added value to our customers by means of digitalisation, leading us to the launch of Bjørnson Online in 2022 - a digital learning universe consisting of e-modules, and an app for use in leadership development, staff development, and more.  
 
Important tasks lie in the future.