
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

The Icelandic Blueprint: How Videntifier and NATO Innovation Fund Are Shaping a Safer, Smarter Future
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
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 perspec
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 so
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 circ
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 U
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 initiati