The Killer Innovations Show with Phil McKinney
Step into the world of relentless creativity with the Killer Innovations Podcast, hosted by Phil McKinney. Since 2005, it has carved its niche in history as the longest-running podcast. Join the community of innovators, designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. Discover the power of thinking differently and taking risks to achieve success. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including innovation, technology, business, leadership, creativity, design, and more. Every episode is not just talk; it's about taking action and implementing strategies that can help you become a successful innovator. Each episode provides practical tips, real-life examples, and thought-provoking insights that will challenge your thinking and inspire you to unleash your creativity. The podcast archive: KillerInnovations.com About Phil McKinney: Phil McKinney, CTO of HP (ret) and CEO of CableLabs, has been credited with forming and leading multiple teams that FastCompany and BusinessWeek list as one of the "50 Most Innovative". His recognition includes Vanity Fair naming him "The Innovation Guru," MSNBC and Fox Business calling him "The Gadget Guy," and the San Jose Mercury News dubbing him the "chief seer."
Episodes
Twenty-one years.
That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story.
After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and what doesn't. You learn not to get too attached because you never know what's going to connect.
But this one surpri...
Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated the risk at closer to one in one hundred. A thousand times more dangerous than management...
Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50?
Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong.
Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year...
I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open.
Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it.
My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents' estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead.
That was surgery number one.
By Thanksgiving this year, I'd had five cardia...
In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at spotting problems on their own.
...
You're frozen. The deadline's approaching. You don't have all the data. Everyone wants certainty. You can't give it. Sound familiar?
Maybe it's a hiring decision with three qualified candidates and red flags on each one. Or a product launch where the market research is mixed. Or a career pivot where you can't predict which path leads where. You want more informa...
Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like
$37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes.
Three executives lost their jobs this month for making the same mistake. ...
You see a headline: "Study Shows Coffee Drinkers Live Longer." You share it in 3 seconds flat. But here's what just happened—you confused correlation with causation, inductive observation with deductive proof, and you just became a vector for misinformation. Right now, millions of people are doing the exact same thing, spreading beliefs they think are facts, making decisions based on patterns that don't exist, all whil...
The Crisis We're Not Talking About
We're living through the greatest thinking crisis in human history—and most people don't even realize it's happening.
Right now, AI generates your answers before you've finished asking the question. Search engines remember everything so you don't have to. Algorithms curate your re...
Most innovation leaders are performing someone else's version of innovation thinking.
I've spent decades in this field. Worked with Fortune 100 companies. And here's what I see happening everywhere.
Brilliant leaders following external frameworks. Copying methodologies from people they admire. Shifting their approach based ...
Michael Dell and his investors spent twenty-five billion dollars to buy back Dell Technologies. But they weren't really buying a company. They were buying freedom from quarterly earnings pressure.
I'm Phil McKinney, former CTO of Hewlett-Packard, and I witnessed how this pressure shaped decisions for years. Today, we are exploring why the Read more
What if I told you that the people who disagree with you are actually your secret weapon for better thinking?
Just last month, my wife and I had a heated argument about studio changes I wanted to make here on the ranch. Her immediate reaction was about cost. Mine was about productivity and creativity. We were talking past each other completely. But when I appli...
In 2005, I had a ten-minute conversation at San Jose Airport that generated billions in revenue for HP. But here's what's fascinating: three other HP executives heard the exact same conversation and saw nothing special about it.
If you read Monday's Studio Notes, you know this story from the emotional side—what it felt like to have that breakthrough moment, the ...
In October 1903, The New York Times published an editorial mocking the idea of human flight, stating that a successful flying machine might take "from one to ten million years" to develop through the efforts of mathematicians and engineers.
Eight weeks later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, controlled flight over the beache...
Your best innovation ideas aren't losing to bad ideas – they're losing to exhaustion.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. After 30 years of making billion-dollar innovation decisions at HP and CableLabs, I thought I understood why good ideas failed. Market timing. Technical challenges. Resource constraints.
Sometimes that...
A software engineer grabbed a random word from a dictionary – "beehive" – and within hours designed an algorithm that saved his company millions. While his colleagues were working harder, he was thinking differently.
This breakthrough didn't come from luck. It came from lateral thinking – a systematic approach to finding solutions hiding in plain sight.
<...
The most popular piece of innovation advice in Silicon Valley is wrong—and it's killing great ideas before they have a chance to succeed.
I can prove it with a story about a glass of water that sat perfectly still while a car bounced beneath it.
My name is Phil McKinney. I spent decades as HP's CTO making billion-dollar innovation decisions, and I learned the hard way that following "fail fast...
Innovation partnerships can create breakthrough markets—or hand them to competitors through terrible decisions. I know because I lived through both outcomes.
Bill Geiser from Fossil and I had it exactly right. We built the MetaWatch—a smartwatch with week-long battery life, Bluetooth connectivity, and every feature that would later make the Apple Watch successfu...
You know that moment when you walk into a meeting and immediately sense the mood in the room? Or when a proposal looks perfect on paper, but something feels off? That's your intuition working—and it's more sophisticated than most people realize.
Every leader has experienced this: sensing which team member to approach with a sensitive request before you've consciously analyzed the personalities involved. Kn...
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