
Innovation Storytellers
Did you ever wonder how an innovation got to its finish line? How innovators saw the future, made a product, and created change – in our world and in their companies? I did. Innovation Storytellers invites changemakers to describe how they created their innovation and just as important – THE STORIES – that made us fall in love with them. Come learn how great innovations need great stories to make them move around the world and how to become a better storyteller in the process. I’m Susan Lindner, the Innovation Storyteller. But I wasn’t always. I’ve been a wannabe revolutionary, an epidemiologist at the CDC and an AIDS educator in the brothels of Thailand helping to turn former sex workers into entrepreneurs. Trained as an anthropologist and the Founder of Emerging Media, I’ve spent the last twenty years working with innovators from 60+ countries. Ranging from cutting edge startups to Fortune 100 companies like GE, Corning, Citi, Olayan, and nine foreign governments, helping their leaders to tell their stories and teaching them how to become incredible advocates for their innovations. Great innovation stories make change possible. They let us step into a future we can’t see yet. I started this podcast to shine a light on our generation of great innovators, to learn how they brought their innovation to life and the stories they told to bring them to the world.
Show episodes

NASA Retiree and Leader/Speaker on Open Innovation, Open Talent, and the Future of Work
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 pr
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 inno
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, an
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 sustaina

How BIG Is Architecting Sustainable Structures from Earth to the Moon and Back Again
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 c
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