Osvald M. Bjelland

Osvald Magne Bjelland (/byelənd/); born March 19, 1960) is a Norwegian entrepreneur, investor and business executive. He is the founder and chairman of Origination AS, an Oslo -based company that mobilizes innovation leaders worldwide to invest in service of people and the planet with long-term strategic foresight. Bjelland is also the editor of an anthology entitled Hope for the Future of Our Planet: A Manifesto for Seven Generations (early 2025 release). The book represents the publishing end of Origination's broader initiative to foster optimism-fueled action as humanity grapples with climate change and social tipping points.

Early life

Osvald Bjelland was born in 1960 in the North Sea port town of Haugesund, Norway, to a family that originally hailed from Bjelland village in Åkrafjorden. He and his three siblings grew up in Sandeid village, now part of the Vindafjord municipality, along the mountainous Fjord Coast of southwestern Norway. His father, Kristoffer Johan Bjelland (1932-2010), and mother, Henny (born in 1939) owned a farm and a grocery. From his earliest years, Bjelland helped out on the family farm and store and performed a variety of jobs for neighboring seaside farms. Throughout his life, Bjelland has maintained a rigorous work discipline, environmental consciousness and sense of ancestral roots, and he has passed along these same values to the younger generations around him. He has in interviews ascribed this trifecta to his father's rugged ethos.

Education and career

Bjelland left home at age 16 to attend high school in Haugesund. Following military service in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, he obtained a BA from BI Norwegian Business School. He went on to attend Henley Business School in England, completing an MBA in 1986. Very early on in his career, he was appointed director of the Norwegian Savings Banks Association. He was still in his 20s when he heeded the call of cosmopolitan culture and took a position with SMG Research in New York City. Upon his return to Norway, he started The Performance Group (TPG), a consulting firm advising corporate senior management on work process efficiency. Key clients included General Motors, Tivoli and IBM in the United States and Electrolux in Sweden. In 2000, after selling The Performance Group in the wake of the dot-com bubble, he traded commerce for academia, earning a PhD from the University of Leeds (UK) in 2008. Later, he would return to academia as a visiting business fellow at the University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, further exploring the topic of his dissertation: the transformative role of leadership in deploying IT within information-intensive organizations. It was during these campus engagements that, taking stock of the world's mounting environmental challenges, Bjelland began carving a niche for himself at the crossroads of business and planet-positive growth. The central theme of his research probed the multitrillion-dollar question: what combination of technologies, business models, partnerships, and policy incentives can accelerate the energy transition at scale?

Several purpose-driven ventures followed, notably the 2001 launch of his advisory firm Xynteo, dedicated to guiding energy transition in frontier markets such as India. He served as CEO, president and chairman. In 2023, Bjelland sold a majority share of Xynteo to Leon Capital and retained a 20 percent stake along with an employee ownership arrangement.

Bjelland's legacy is also stamped on partnerships with business consortiums forged through the Tata Xynteo Exchange, a joint venture helmed by Bjelland and the chairman of Tata Sons. Partners include Vikaasa (featuring Aditya Birla, Hindustan Unilever, Shell plc and Cyient, among others) and Europe Delivers (featuring MasterCard, Shell plc, Santander, ABB, Shell plc, SAP and DB Schenker). Under Bjelland's stewardship, Xynteo also built The Leadership Vanguard, working with global CEOs, heads of state, Nobel laureates and scientists to promote “good growth” in service of people and the planet. Together, the companies and collaborative entities have delivered over 500 projects in the U.S., China, India, Europe and Brazil.

Bjelland's commitment to environmentalism took on a new focus in the wake of his keynote address at the 2006 convention of chief executives with India's largest conglomerate, Tata Group, where he spoke about climate change. Following his presentation, an attending CEO asked, “How can you talk so much about the climate when people don't have food on the table?” The question would launch Bjelland on a quest to reinvent economic growth, premised in his recognition that the Earth's fate cannot be separated from the fate of its inhabitants. His critique of a zero-sum approach argues that: “If you only provide for the planet, its living creatures will suffer. But if you provide its living creatures with unhealthy food, water and air while undermining the planet's capacity to support us, that too is doomed.”

Bjelland became known as a pioneer in systems change by championing cross-border and cross-sector partnerships to catalyze change at scale. Another prong of this strategy involved blended finance, whereby corporate, government and philanthropic funds are mobilized for emerging and frontier markets, yielding gains for investors and communities alike.

A hallmark of Bjelland's entrepreneurship has been to bridge business and the arts. One of the earliest incarnations of this concept was launched with the creative think tank he established in 2000. Called The Performance Theatre Foundation, it broke new ground in bringing together policymakers, scientists, Nobel laureates, technology innovators, creatives, business leaders and others to explore high-impact solutions. The Performance Theatre convened each year until 2022 in a different global city, including Delhi, Beijing, London, Istanbul, Lisbon, Singapore and Seattle.

Under Bjelland's oversight, his companies and the Foundation published numerous such as Choose Growth; Tata-Xynteo Exchange; Unlocking Europe's Vibrant Future; Higher Resolutions: Leadership for a Changing Social Contract; and A New Kind of Growth for Europe: 4 Grand Challenges. He has also written extensively in collaboration with strategic management expert Robert Chapman Wood.

Media and public speaking

Bjelland's work has been widely published. He has written for and been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, Fortune magazine, Financial Times, MIT Sloan Management Review and Strategy & Leadership. He also served as an expert commentator for the Green Initiative spearheaded by Harvard Business Review.

Personal life

Bjelland is married to Thorhild Widvey, a native of Torvastad in Karmøy, Rogaland whose political career encompassed appointments as Norway's Minister of Petroleum and Energy as well as Minister of Culture, in addition to serving as a member of the Norwegian Parliament.

The couple has two sons: Ole Kristoffer (born 1992) and Johannes (born 1994). Away from the corporate world, Bjelland enjoys fishing and mountain getaways with loved ones. He helps his brother look after the family farm, where they are committed to achieving a zero-pesticide environment. Reading and music are Bjelland's other cherished pastimes.

Corporate boards

Bjelland chairs several boards, including those of his own investment companies Norvegen Ventures, Henley and Origination.

Volunteering

Bjelland's companies provide pro bono services for the International Red Cross.

He and his family have long supported civil society causes across health and athletics sectors including the Nadija Children's Hospital & Research Institute in Ukraine.