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...

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 singl...

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...

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. T...

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 ea...

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...

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...

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 analys...

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...

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 ve...

Why high-growth entrepreneurship is a different kind of economic infrastructure — and why most regions don’t have a strategy for it. I recently published an essay arguing that every startup is a headquarters. The data behind that claim is compelling — young firms create virtually all net new jobs, innovation-economy wages run double the national median, and every one of those jobs generates five m...

Across agriculture, mining, and construction, billion-dollar supply chains still run on a phone call and a guess. Someone walks outside, eyeballs a pile of feed, and tells the truck dispatcher what they think is left. They're wrong by 30 to 50 percent — and that error ripples into spoiled inventory, empty feedlots, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. Warren Wang and his co-founder Cole...

Travis Fitzwater spent 12 years in the Missouri legislature building the policy infrastructure behind the state's innovation economy — the Right to Start Act, the Office of Entrepreneurship, STEM workforce mandates. Then, instead of running for reelection, he walked away from the chamber to lead the Missouri Technology Corporation, the state-backed venture fund he once helped govern from a board s...

What does it take to lead a community that's spent decades being treated like a stepchild? In this episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Mayor Christal Watson — the first Black woman to lead Kansas City, Kansas and Wyandotte County — for a candid conversation about trust, resilience, and the quiet work of rebuilding institutions from the inside. Recorded in front of a l...

Most people who see a broken food system either accept it or complain about it. Max Kaniger did something different — he walked into 70 corner stores and got told no by every single one before finding a partner willing to take a chance on fresh produce. Today, Kanbe's Markets operates in 125 locations across the Kansas City metro, covers 260 square miles, and rescued 1.7 million pounds of food las...

What if everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong? Forty to fifty percent of people experiencing homelessness in America are employed. They're working. They're contributing. And they still can't afford a place to live. That single fact dismantles most of the narratives we tell ourselves about who this crisis affects — and who's responsible for solving it. Jarrod Sanderson is the Ex...

Everyone assumes that underinvested communities, early-stage ecosystems, and emerging innovation hubs need more money. More grants. More venture. More philanthropic dollars. But the evidence from 50+ conversations on this show tells a different story. The communities and companies that are actually building durable growth aren’t the ones that raised the most capital. They’re the ones where the cap...

Jo Blaq left Kansas City because the infrastructure for a music career didn't exist. He went to LA, built one anyway — Grammy nominations, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, private jets — and then came back. Now he's building what he calls ground zero for creatives, a multimedia creative hub in the Crossroads designed to change the equation: world-class tools, real career pathways, and a community bui...

After 50+ conversations on The Disruption Lab, one pattern keeps surfacing: the thing that slows down innovation is almost never the technology. It’s the invisible friction — trust gaps, procurement processes, cultural resistance, systems not designed to absorb change at the speed it arrives. In this solo episode, Kevin McGinnis connects threads across the show’s catalog — from clinical trials to...

The U.S. offshored its critical minerals processing decades ago. Now 95% of the world's nickel runs through China — regardless of where it comes out of the ground. Jamie Andes and William Highsmith from Critical Materials Crossroads break down what that dependency actually means, why Kansas City has the infrastructure and history to lead the reshoring effort, and what a $160 million NSF Engines gr...

Why do new drugs and medical breakthroughs take so long to reach real people? In this episode of The Disruption Lab, we sit down with Kyle McAllister, founder of trially, an AI-driven clinical trials company, to unpack the uncomfortable truth: the biggest bottleneck in clinical trials isn’t innovation — it’s patient recruitment. And in many hospitals, that process still looks like teams of researc...

What if one of the biggest barriers to escaping abuse or entering mental health treatment wasn’t money, fear, or access? In this live episode of The Disruption Lab, we sit down with the co-founders, Matt Krentz and Andy Bond, of BestyBnB, a fast-growing social impact startup that’s tackling one of the most overlooked barriers in domestic violence, behavioral health, substance use recovery, and hou...

What if the fastest way to build better cities wasn’t behind closed doors—but out in the open? In this episode of The Disruption Lab, we sit down with Zach Molzer, Founder of Molzer Development, who is challenging every traditional rule of development by building in public—documenting projects in real time, sharing wins and failures openly, and inviting the community into the process instead of sh...

What happens to work, dignity, and human purpose in a world where AI can write, diagnose, advise, and automate faster than most people ever could? In this episode, we sit down with Ed, a longtime social enterprise leader and Goodwill CEO, to unpack one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prepare people for the future of work without leaving the most vulnerable behind? Drawing from...

Artificial intelligence and autonomy are no longer future concepts in national security—they’re shaping real-world decisions, operations, and outcomes today. But while AI technology is advancing rapidly, the real challenge lies in data, culture, trust, and speed of adoption. In this special episode of The Disruption Lab, we explore Building Autonomy and AI for National Security in Kansas City, fea...