The Disruption Lab

Why do the most promising innovation programs inside big companies keep getting killed — even when they're working? Host Kevin McGinnis shares the story of Hack Friday, a hackathon program he helped build inside Sprint that grew in popularity month after month, only to be shut down for not producing a "shippable" solution fast enough.
In this solo episode, Kevin argues that story isn't unique — it's a symptom of how corporations structure innovation itself. He draws on research from sociologist Ronald Burt, author Frans Johansson, and the economic concept of absorptive capacity to explain why proximity to new ideas, not a defined ROI, is what actually drives breakthroughs. He closes with four practical shifts leaders can make to protect innovation from getting measured to death before it has a chance to compound.
A candid, research-backed look at why innovation keeps getting killed for the wrong reasons — and what to do instead.

Most people hear "Kansas City" and think warehouses and highways. That's about 10% of the real story.
In this episode, Kevin sits down with Chris Gutierrez, President of KC SmartPort, who has spent 23 years building the case for why Kansas City is one of the most strategically positioned regions in North America — five Class I railroads, all four modes of freight transportation, and the only single-line railroad connecting Canada to Mexico, running straight through downtown.
They dig into how the CPKC merger reshaped the region overnight, why foreign trade zones are quietly driving billions in trade, and how nearshoring is pulling manufacturing back from overseas. But the conversation goes deeper than logistics — into automation, robotics, and the AI-driven data center boom creating an entirely new category of jobs nobody's training for yet.
This is a story about infrastructure, yes. But it's really a story about what gets built when a region stops waiting to be noticed.

Everyone keeps saying nuclear is "having a moment." But Kevin McGinnis has heard that before — and this time, the pressure isn't coming from where you'd expect.
In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, Kevin sits down with Jason Pottorff of Deep Fission, the company drilling reactors a mile underground outside Parsons, Kansas, and Dr. Amir Bahadori, who rebuilt Kansas State's nuclear engineering program from a handful of students into one of the fastest-growing programs in the country.
Together they unpack what's actually different this time: the staggering electricity demand created by AI and data centers, a workforce gap that requires tripling the entire sector by 2050, and a public-trust problem that decades of safety still haven't solved. Jason explains why putting a small reactor under a mile of water makes a meltdown nearly impossible — and why "innovation, not invention" is the real strategy. Amir makes the case that the hardest engineering problem in nuclear isn't technical at all. It's communication.
This is a conversation about systems change: how a 70-year-old technology gets a second chance, what an emerging "nuclear corridor" across Kansas and Missouri could mean, and the one thing both guests admit could send the whole industry backward overnight.

What if the thing everyone agrees we need more of is the thing that matters least?
In this solo episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis turns a critical eye on his own field — the world of innovation economies and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The diagnosis is always the same: more programming, more access, more capital. Kevin argues we've been measuring the wrong thing almost entirely.
The companies that actually reshape a region were mostly built before they ever reached a program — outside of it, or beneath what we bother to count. Which raises a harder question than anyone usually asks: does any of it cause the outcome, or does it simply select the companies that were going to win anyway, then stand close enough to take the credit?
This is a clear-eyed reckoning with selection versus causation — and what an honest scoreboard would actually have to measure. Growth, Kevin believes, is designed, not accidental. But design is not the same as counting.

Jeff spent fifteen years inside one of America's most celebrated startup ecosystems. Then he left Austin for Kansas City — to run a program handing out $20,000 grants. On paper, a step back. In practice, a bet on a different way of building.
In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with the new steward of Digital Sandbox KC — the 13-year-old program that's turned early proof-of-concept funding into more than $243 million in follow-on capital. They trace an unlikely path: a 4,500-mile charity bike ride from Texas to Alaska, building cancer-care software at Epic, founding companies of his own, and arriving at a conviction that the coasts don't own the blueprint for innovation.
The conversation moves from the culture of how cities build, to what actually separates fundable founders from everyone else, to why deep domain expertise is quietly overtaking raw technical skill in the age of AI.
It's a clear-eyed look at community, capital, and the systems that decide whose ideas get built — and whose don't.
Society. Business. Technology. One founder rethinking where the next wave of companies gets made.

This is a different kind of episode. Every solo I've done has been about a framework — a thesis, a system, an argument. This one is about a person.
Dan Hesse was my CEO at Sprint and became my mentor. He taught me that business and community are not separate things. I understood it as a value. It took me fifteen years to understand it as a design principle.
This is the story of what I watched Dan build, what happened when it was taken away, and how losing it shaped everything I'm building now — from Keystone to the Social Venture Studio.
The written version lives in my Field Note on Substack. https://substack.com/@kevinmcginnis101/note/p-199455241?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=539sc6

For decades, social skills training in schools meant one thing: a teacher singling out a student in front of their peers to practice something they don't yet know how to do. Dr. Amber Rowland spent over a decade building a better answer.
VOISS — a virtual reality and simulation platform developed at the University of Kansas — gives students with autism and social-emotional learning needs a private, low-stakes space to practice the skills that determine whether they'll get a job, keep a relationship, and navigate the world. No audience. No humiliation. Just repetition, confidence, and data.
In this episode, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Dr. Rowland and co-founder Paul Epp to explore what happens when a decade of peer-reviewed research collides with the brutal realities of commercialization — ed-tech procurement cycles, university IP licensing, the race against a ticking tech-transfer clock, and the challenge of turning $11-in-savings-per-dollar outcomes into a business that can actually scale.
This is a conversation about dignity, systems change, and what it really takes to get life-changing research out of the lab and into the hands of the kids who need it most.

Andrew Hsu spent more than a decade building Spotlight, a market intelligence and analyst relations firm that helped some of the most recognized names in enterprise technology figure out how to be understood, not just seen, in the markets they were trying to shape.
But this conversation isn't about the company. It's about the systems behind the company: the hidden infrastructure of industry analysts who quietly dictate which technologies win, how AI is rewriting the rules of market influence in real time, and what it costs, personally and strategically, to build something worth stepping away from.
Andrew and host Kevin McGinnis dig into why the most dangerous thing a founder can do is get distracted, what the correlation between your Glassdoor score and your stock price tells us about leadership, and why the 50-year-old version of Andrew understands something the 32-year-old version refused to believe: that listening is a strategy, not a weakness.
This episode is for founders, operators, and anyone who has ever wondered who actually shapes what the market believes and whether that system is about to change forever.

Every Fortune 500 company says they want to work with startups. Almost none of them actually can.
The problem isn't intention. It's infrastructure.
When a corporation scales, it builds immune systems—legal, compliance, IT, procurement—designed to protect the core business. Those same systems treat startups like viruses. A startup can build a prototype in the time it takes a corporation to schedule the meeting to discuss building one. The corporate entry point is procurement. The startup's frame is survival. The risk profiles don't align. The cadences don't match. And after 25 years of watching this pattern repeat, the infrastructure to make it work simply doesn't exist.
Until now.
In this episode, Kevin McGinnis sits down with a corporate innovation veteran who spent years inside Sprint driving open innovation strategy, building accelerator programs, and watching promising startup relationships die in legal review. But more importantly: he's spent the last several years designing the actual infrastructure that makes corporate-startup alignment work at scale.
He reveals why "sponsored happy hours" and "innovation challenges" fail. Why the entry point matters more than the intention. And why one structural change—a reverse pitch, where corporations bring real problems instead of startups pitching solutions—completely transforms engagement from transactional to transformational.
This is systems design thinking applied to one of the region's biggest untapped opportunities: corporations and startups learning to work together.

Most people don't realize that the food on their table and the medicine keeping their pets alive flow through a system few understand. Kim Young, President of KC Animal Health Corridor, has spent 15 years at the center of that system building Kansas City's Animal Health Corridor into a $90 billion global industry hub while the rest of America wasn't looking.
Animal health isn't about farmers or veterinarians. It's about infrastructure, capital allocation, regulatory strategy, and how disruption actually spreads through systems that have existed for over a century. It's about innovation that touches AI, biotech, satellite technology, and protein security—all while competing against a region obsessed with whatever's shiny and new.
In this episode, Kim reveals why the most sophisticated biotech companies in America are clustering in Kansas City—not Silicon Valley. She explains the consolidation reshaping the industry, the venture capital blind spot that's leaving early-stage founders underfunded, and why the next generation of talent doesn't want to work in animal health because no one's told them it exists.
But more importantly: she makes the case for why Kansas City's greatest economic advantage isn't what we're chasing—it's what we're taking for granted.