About our Internship Program

The program is managed by our Founder and CEO, Frode Odegard, and has as its purpose to develop the next generation of management thinkers and practitioners in a setting that mixes research and practical application.  Each applicant will have specific learning objectives and we meet regularly with interns to ensure that  the tasks they are assigned are of educational value and addresses the initially stated learning objectives.  

The internships are unpaid and in compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Interns will not be asked to “help out” on unrelated tasks and projects. Projects interns are assigned to are not “pretend projects”, they have real  application to our field of research and will result in outcomes meaningful to participants’ career development.

The internship participants may work part-time or full-time from June 15-August 15 (we are flexible with start/end dates).  Participants in Silicon Valley will be expected to come into the office once or twice a week. Working remotely is fine.  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. 

Projects

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

Post-Pandemic Predictions and Trends

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Post-Industrial Institute organized a number of panel discussions with a broad spectrum of speakers. These included a former prime minister, investors, technologists, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. A number of observations and predictions were made about a wide variety of trends. For example, we discussed how the pandemic was accelerating decentralization, the changes in strategy in large companies, the evolving work landscape, and unprecedented levels of government intervention.

We wish to learn more about what predictions turned out to be right, where we were wrong, and what changes persisted after the lockdowns ended.

In this project we will:

• Build a taxonomy of observations and predictions
• Locate trustworthy data sources for each
• Review 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.

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. The project is sponsored by Broadcom and our primary collaboration there is Laureen Knudsen, Broadcom’s Chief Transformation Officer. 

In this project we will:

• Conduct exploratory interviews with corporate executives
• Develop and publish an e-book with preliminary findings 
• Develop a survey instrument which 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 a little each  year). We have 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.

Contacts

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