Management science and tools for building our post-industrial future

Based in Silicon Valley, the Post-Industrial Institute (PII) is a global research and consulting firm helping corporates and private equity firms navigate, exploit, and engage in disruptive and breakthrough innovation. We work with boards and CEOs to provide executive education, workshops, and strategic advice. Our mission is to develop a post-industrial management science and provide leaders with the tools and practices to build the future.

In collaboration with industry partners, PII also operates the Post-Industrial Forum. We gather executives, investors, founders, and policymakers to discuss new technologies and the future that is emerging.

PII was founded by Frode Odegard in 2004. Our initial mission was to reinvent Lean Management for modern knowledge-based organizations. We spent ten years helping corporates transform for improved innovation and execution across a range of complex and knowledge-intensive verticals. These included enterprise software, aerospace & defense, game development, medical devices, mobile, and mass media. Our research and fieldwork led to the development of the Lean Systems Framework, a comprehensive organizational design framework. For this work, Frode was awarded a Fellowship by the Lean Systems Society.

In 2014 we began a new chapter, observing that exponential technologies were undermining all the common assumptions in organizational design. After a study of 12,000 years of economic history, we concluded that humanity was transitioning to a post-industrial civilization. We embarked on a quest to develop a new management science with new solutions and practices suitable for the world that is now emerging. We refer to this as Post-Lean Thinking because of its emphasis on just-in-time micro-organizations, looser relationships between people and organizations, micro-factories, AI, and disruptive and breakthrough innovation.