Innovation Storytellers

What does it take to turn an entire city into a thriving innovation hub? In this episode of The Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Callie Taylor, Vice President of Economic Development at Opportunity Austin, to explore how Austin, Texas, evolved from a creative, music-fueled city into one of the world's fastest-growing innovation ecosystems. This is not just a profile of a single company or tech success stor...

What if getting your big idea across the finish line wasn't about pitching harder, but about thinking like a storyteller… or a mastermind?

In this episode of The Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Ed Essey, Director of Business Value at The Microsoft Garage, to uncover the surprising mechanics behind one of the most successful innovation engines in tech. Ed isn't just helping Microsoft employees...

Do corporate innovators truly innovate, or are they trapped inside systems that make real transformation impossible?

On this episode of The Innovation Storytellers Show, I speak with Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners and author of The Illusion of Innovation. Drawing on decades of experience launching startups with High Alpha and advising Fortune 100 companies at Innosight, Elliott explains why most cor...

What does it really take to fix a billion-dollar bottleneck inside a company famous for saying no to new spending? And how do you translate that same problem-solving into one of the world’s largest bureaucracies?

This week, I sat down with Danielle McCormick, Founder of Immersive Insights, whose talent for turning messy systems into high-performance engines has saved companies like Southwest Airlines and d...

Steve Rader returns to share how open innovation has transformed from an experiment to a mission-critical tool inside NASA and beyond. As a newly minted retiree from NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, Steve unpacks how crowdsourcing and challenge-based problem-solving went from fringe ideas to proven ways of tackling complex technical barriers.

He explains what NASA looked like befor...

What does it take to shake up one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world from the inside out? On this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I invite you to buckle up for a conversation that dives straight into the heart of how the US Air Force is building a homegrown culture of audacious innovation through its Blue Horizons Fellowship.

I’m joined by Colonel Daniel Ruttenber and D...

In this episode, I sit down with Shegun Otulana, founder and former CEO of Therapy Brands. His journey from arriving in Birmingham, Alabama at 18 to leading one of the largest software exits in the state's history is nothing short of remarkable.

Shegun opens up about his early days, the lessons learned from failure, and the moment his wife encouraged him to finally go all in. He explains how he used consul...

In this special episode of Nordic Visionaries, I'm joined by Lincoln Bleveans, Senior Sustainability Executive at Stanford University. He is leading one of the most ambitious real-world experiments in climate innovation happening anywhere in the United States. If you've ever wondered what it would take to turn sustainability from a pledge into daily practice, Lincoln has answers grounded in both pragmatism and long-ter...

In this special Nordic Visionaries edition of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I am joined by one of the most influential architects of our time, Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group. From reimagining the clean port of Copenhagen to designing the first permanent human habitat on the Moon, Bjarke’s work challenges conventional thinking about architecture, sustainability, and innovation.

In th...

What does building a business with climate responsibility at its core look like, not as an add-on but as a starting point?

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers Show, we're heading to the Nordics to meet two young leaders who are challenging the status quo around what it means to be a sustainable business. This is part of our special "Nordic Visionaries" series, where we hear directly from the next ge...

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, part of our Nordic Visionaries Pocket Podcast series, we explore that connection with Ari Jónsson, COO of Identifier Technologies and Director at the NATO Innovation Fund. Ari’s journey began with a PhD in AI at Stanford in the early 90s, when artificial intelligence was far from mainstream. What started as a passion for robotics evolved into software agents that supported de...

What does it mean to innovate with principle in a world of complexity, volatility, and accelerating change? This week, I spoke with Anu Bradford,  Professor of Law, Director of European Legal Studies Center, Columbia Law School.

As part of our Nordic Visionaries series, Anu brings a timely and thought-provoking perspective on the intersection of innovation, regulation, and sustainability. Known globally fo...

This week I was thrilled to speak with Peder Naerboe, Founder and Owner of Bulk Infrastructure, for my Nordic Visionaries series. I’ve known about data centers for years, but Peder totally reframed them for me as “power refineries,” where Norway’s abundant clean energy can be converted into digital form right at the source. 

By placing data hubs next to renewable power generation like hydropower, Peder see...

What will it take to move beyond the traditional recycling conversation and into a future where circularity is a business imperative, not just a sustainability slogan?

In this episode of Nordic Visionaries, I speak with Tove Andersen, President and CEO of TOMRA, a company founded in Norway that has been working on circular economy solutions for over 50 years. With operations in over 100 countries, TOMRA's ...

What if the key to creating a more sustainable future lies not in reinventing capitalism entirely, but in looking at how it already works elsewhere?

In this episode of Nordic Visionaries, a special series inside the Innovation Storytellers Show, we welcome Dr. Robert Strand, Executive Director of the Nordic Center at UC Berkeley and Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. With one foot firml...

This week I was delighted to sit down with Ann Molin, CEO & Secretary General of Hack for Earth, for an in-depth conversation on how citizen-led innovation can tackle global challenges. Ann, a psychologist by training, first fell in love with hackathons while working on the Swedish Government’s Hack for Sweden initiative, where she realized that bringing people together to solve open-data challenges could spark powerfu...

In this opening installment of Nordic Visionaries, I introduce a fresh series spotlighting entrepreneurs, creators, and advocates at the crossroads of innovation and sustainability throughout the Nordic countries. 

My first guest, Mathias Wikström, sheds light on how cultural values shape our approach to protecting nature and why weaving sustainability into financial services is a long-term strategy. Toget...

Have you ever considered the role that discipline, trust, and storytelling play in shaping truly innovative leaders?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I'm honored to welcome Miles Garrett, a veteran leader, author, and former Executive Officer of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Cheyenne. Drawing from his extensive 25-year career spanning both the United States Marine Corps and the Navy...

Can innovation truly succeed without trust, integrity, and the right team behind it? In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show I welcome Tracy Nolan, Senior Vice President of MarketPoint at Humana, for an insightful discussion on what it really takes to lead big ideas and bold changes.

Tracy shares how her journey began in an unexpected place—retail—where an inventive approach led to record-break...