About our Internship Program

Our internship program is managed by our Founder and CEO, Frode Odegard. The purpose of the program is to help develop the next generation of management thinkers and practitioners, in a setting that mixes research and practical application.

Program participants will have specific learning objectives agreed to at the outset. We meet regularly with research interns to ensure that their activities are of educational value and address their specific objectives. Participants will not be assigned to “pretend projects”, they will be doing real management research which will result in outcomes meaningful to their career development.

Interns may participate part-time or full-time. We are flexible with start/end dates, but the internship period is customarily one quarter, subject to optional renewal. Participants in Silicon Valley can come into our office in Menlo Park on an as-needed basis, but we are used to working remotely with the usual online collaboration tools.

Our internships are unpaid. We do not cover travel costs or school fees and we expect you to sort out whatever requirements your university (if you are a student) may impose on you. We are required to comply with State of California rules for internships.

Current Projects

This year we have two projects available for research interns to work on:

Post-Globalization Predictions and Trends

In 2019 the Post-Industrial Institute launched a leadership community, the Post-Industrial Forum, with SRI International as our primary strategic partner. The Forum has organized a number of events (45 so far) with a broad spectrum of senior-level speakers. These have included a former prime minister, investors, technologists, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives.

A number of observations and predictions have been made concerning a wide variety of trends. For example, we discussed how the pandemic accelerated decentralization, strategy changes in large companies, the advantages of small countries, the future of manufacturing, and the evolving hybrid work landscape. Last year we also looked at innovation in a fracturing world in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year we have focused on Generative AI and its impact on work, organizations, and innovation.

We wish to learn more about what predictions turned out to be right, where we were wrong, and what changes have persisted after the lockdowns ended. The pandemic left big footprints in our economy and culture. We are now in what will likely be a lengthy period of geopolitical turmoil, with regional blocks taking the place of a “flat world”. It is important to develop a deeper understanding of how various trends are connected as we move into the future.

In this project, we will:

• Build a taxonomy of observations and predictions
• Locate trustworthy data sources for each
• Identify contrasts between predictions and actual outcomes

The conclusions from the project will be described in an e-book and in a presentation in our Post-Industrial Forum.  The taxonomy of trends will also be used in further research and publications. A likely follow-on project will be to automate the data collection for the trends on an ongoing basis.

Organizational Transformation in Global-2000 Firms

Virtually every Global 2000 firm is engaged in some type of transformation effort. There is a great deal of variation from company to company, however. In this project, we will learn about why organizations are seeking to transform, what their goals look like, the strategies and approaches they employ, their biggest challenges, and successes others can learn from.

In this project, we will:

• Conduct exploratory interviews with corporate executives
• Develop and publish an e-book with preliminary findings 
• Develop a survey instrument that will be distributed to 20,000 executives
• Analyze results and develop an e-book with our findings

This will be a yearly effort, reusing the database of participants and the survey instrument (which may be adjusted over time).

We have now completed exploratory interviews with a number of executives and we are currently in the process of composing the preliminary e-book. We will use the e-book to promote the survey and thereby maximize the number of responses.

The project is sponsored by Broadcom and our primary collaborator is its Chief Transformation Officer, Laureen Knudsen.

Contacts

For more information about available internship roles, please email us at interns @ post-industrial.institute.