Large corporations are increasingly looking to the principles of lean startups to help develop new business ideas and spur innovation. Such is the case with IgniteConnex Inc., a subsidiary of technology consulting company CG Infinity set up to incubate new companies.
CG Infinity has now partnered with several faculty at the Naveen Jindal School of Management and the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to create a new, year-long internship program called the Infinite Corporate Incubator Program.
The idea grew out of a conversation between Rajiv Shah, Founder & Program Director for the Systems Engineering and Management (SEM) program at UT Dallas, and Professor of Practice, and Bhopi Dhall, founder and CEO of CG Infinity. The two first met while working at Texas Instruments years ago, and Dhall wanted to give back while also fostering innovation.
Through further conversations with Saurajit Kanungo, president and COO of CG Infinity, and Rob Palacios, Chief Innovation Officer/EVP at CG Infinity and President/Co-Founder at IgniteConnex, Inc., they arrived at the idea of an internship, but one where the university would help vet applications instead of the company fielding applications.
“They wanted to have UTD Master’s level students who can help them to understand what the customer requirements are, understand the internal capabilities, and then take all that into launching new initiatives,” Shah says.
CG Infinity wanted to hire a small cohort of interns with complementary skillsets to work as a team and help incubate new startup ideas. During the fall of 2022, Shah looped in Paul Nichols, Assistant Professor of Practice, and Emily Choi, Associate Professor of Instruction and Academic Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, to help conceptualize this internship program.
“In the past, when they went out and created solutions for their clients, they realized, ‘wow, this solution could actually be useful for more than just this one client, we should build a business around it and launch it,’” Choi says. “But going from the product or idea to launching into a business and scaling it, that’s a whole different process. That’s what we teach in the innovation entrepreneurship program.”
Working with Fiona Hunter in UTD’s Career Management Center and Angela Howard from the graduate advising team, Shah, Nichols, and Choi formalized the program and opened applications on an accelerated timeline compared to most other internship processes. “One weekend, all three of us burned the midnight oil and we narrowed it down [from over 90] to 15 or 20 applicants,” Shah says. They looked for students who had real-world experience and the ability to work as a team. Shah, Nichols, and Choi interviewed those 15-20 applicants and shared their short list with CG Infinity, who then interviewed finalists.
Ultimately, three Master of Science students in Business Analytics were chosen: Madhurima Madgula, Nekitha Ramachandran, and Pakshal Shah. They started in January and will continue through the rest of the calendar year. “Our plan now is to mentor and advise this group of students and make sure they have the right tools and concepts to support CGI initiatives,” Choi says.
The hope is that this partnership will continue indefinitely, and the cohort will grow in future years. Since many students studying entrepreneurship will nevertheless find jobs at large corporations, Nichols says this internship program will help fill a need in bringing entrepreneurial thinking to big companies. “We’ve started talking about, how do we emphasize more the corporate innovation side of things?” he asks. “This gives us a really good example of how you can bring that entrepreneurial mindset into a significantly sized organization.”
