What company were you working at?
This summer, I worked at Innosight, LLC, an innovation strategy consulting firm co-founded by HBS Professor Clayton Christensen and located in nearby Watertown, MA. Innosight was founded ten years ago to take Professor Christensen’s theories on disruptive innovation to the market and help companies learn to seize disruptive opportunities.
What was your position at the company replica watches uk?
I joined the consulting practice as a Summer Associate and worked with a pharmaceutical client on new business model development. I had the opportunity to co-lead an ideation session with brand managers, pharmaceutical sales reps, and outside advertising agencies (think crazy brainstorming sessions from the TOM Ideo case but with a healthy dose of structure). Additionally, I helped develop internal IP around the ideation process.
Why did you choose that internship replica breitling?
I’ve been fascinated by the disruptive innovation theories outlined in Professor Christensen’s work, and I wanted to understand more about why companies have such a hard time finding and executing disruptive opportunities. I thought spending the summer at Innosight would give me a chance to see how these theories tangibly play out and how companies actually think about innovation. I also thought that learning to manage an ideation process and design market experiments to test assumptions would be useful tools to have for the future, whether I continue in consulting or pursue a business development role after my time at HBS.
What was the company culture like?
Awesome, ‘nuff said. More seriously, Innosight has a really great mix of people, including former and current entrepreneurs, academics, journalists, and scientists. Even though each team is focused on their own client case, I found everyone to be very collaborative. I joined many brainstorming sessions for other teams, and I never had trouble recruiting others to pitch ideas from our team.
What was the best part about working there?
You can feel the excitement at Innosight, because the firm is growing quickly and expanding to new industries and geographies. Because the firm believes that companies in emerging markets have significant potential for disruptive opportunities, Innosight recently opened two new offices in Singapore and Chennai, India, for example. On a lighter note, we also had a Nintendo Wii in the office shared among the interns.
What part needed improvement?
I had the opportunity to focus on the ideation process this summer, but Innosight works on many different types of projects for clients in many industries. I would have enjoyed seeing more of a variety of projects, but I think this is the nature of a ten-week, summer internship.
What did you do before HBS, and how did your summer compare?
I previously worked as a management consultant with Booz & Company, where I focused on public sector and oil & gas clients. My experience this summer was 180 degrees different from management consulting, because the projects at Innosight help clients enter entirely new businesses or think about new ways of approaching customers as opposed to develop existing business strategy or improve operations.
Any advice for students who may want to follow in your footsteps?
Take BSSE, and read some of Professor Christensen’s works to get an idea for the type of projects at Innosight.
Anything else?
Innosight could be a great place for anyone thinking about eventually starting their own entrepreneurial venture, or anyone interested in business development or marketing roles.
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Ryan Starks (OB) is an aspiring squash superstar and is currently being coached by HBS’ renowned squash aficionados. Prior to HBS, he worked as a management consultant with Booz & Company, first based in Cleveland and later in Dubai and Kuwait, where he focused on public sector and oil & gas clients.
