The Committed Innovator

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The Committed Innovator episodes

February 27 The Committed Innovator: Why innovation competitions work
McKinsey holds an innovation competition every year; compelling evidence shows that most organizations can benefit from doing same. McKinsey & Company regularly holds an internal competition, the Innovation Olympics, in which our own teams bring their best business ideas to an internal competition. In the most recent cycle over 2,000 McKinsey colleagues competed, with the goal of creating a bottom-up innovation mechanism that surfaces great ideas and put them to work for our clients. In this episode, McKinsey innovation leader and senior partner Erik Roth speaks with our current winners about the process. Part of the team joins us—Iris Roelens, John Law-Lund, and Suryansh Soni—to describe how and why they decided to use machine learning to draw on McKinsey knowledge and create digital agents that could serve as virtual consultants. This is an edited transcript of their conversation. You can follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
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27 min
February 05 The Committed Innovator: Keeping up with AI and deploying it as it evolves
Adopting AI remains a challenge for most, and the fact that the world of AI is advancing so
incredibly rapidly doesn’t help. Nathaniel Whittemore aims to make both adoption and
keeping up with change a lot easier. He is the founder and CEO of Superintelligent, the AI
enablement platform that offers interactive tutorials that provide practical AI education and
clear paths to business solutions. And is also the host of the podcast, AI Daily Brief, that
seeks to keep its listeners up to date with AI as it evolves. In this episode of The Committed
Innovator, McKinsey innovation leaser and senior partner, Erik Roth, speaks with Whittemore
about the intersection between Whittemore’s two companies, the challenges of adopting and
scaling AI for enterprises, and what he sees in store for AI in 2026. This is an edited
transcript of their conversation. You can follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

Related content

Taking fear out of innovation

The essentials of innovation

Reconfiguring work: Change management in the age of gen AI
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35 min
December 17, 2025 The Committed Innovator: Enabling and harnessing the innovation process
Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid discusses the inspiration behind what started as a digital whiteboard and has evolved to become an AI innovation workspace.

Of the many challenges of innovation, enabling members of a team to share and capture their new ideas so they can build on them collaboratively, quickly, and easily is a perennial source of drag. The need to do so remotely inspired Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid to start the online whiteboard platform used for brainstorming, planning, and team collaboration. Today the company has evolved into an AI-driven innovation workspace. In this episode, McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Khusid about the problem Miro seeks to solve, the process of scaling the business, and what is next for the company in the age of generative and agentic AI.

Related reading:

The eight essentials of innovation

Taking fear out of innovation

Fear factor: Overcoming human barriers to innovation
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39 min
November 17, 2025 The Committed Innovator: Taking on the challenge ocean pollution from plastic with Boyan Slat
The Ocean Cleanup's Boyan Slat discusses the promise and challenge of technological innovation at planetary scale. The problem of ocean pollution from plastic waste is growing and intractable, and can feel insurmountable to many consumers. For Dutch innovator Boyan Slat, however, not only is the problem solvable, it’s an imperative. In addition to harming habitats and wildlife, improperly discarded plastics can cause health problems for humans. The founder and CEO of Rotterdam-based The Ocean Cleanup, Slat seeks to both clean up the worst of plastic pollution in oceans, and to stop the flow of plastics from rivers into oceans. McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Slat about the challenges of starting and evolving The Ocean Cleanup, how the organization has found success, and what it takes to continue the effort.
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33 min
April 09, 2025 Restaurateur John McDonald offers a grounded approach to hospitality
In this episode of The Committed Innovator, we talk with John McDonald, the founder and CEO of Mercer Street Hospitality, which owns Lure Fishbar in New York City and Chicago, among other restaurants and bars. McDonald spoke with McKinsey Senior Partner and innovation leader Erik Roth about maintaining success and equilibrium in the notoriously difficult hospitality industry.

Related insights:

What’s on the menu? Revenue growth techniques for restaurants

Cooking up extraordinary growth for restaurants during a downturn

Taking fear out of innovation

How to take the measure of innovation

Fielding high-performing innovation teams

Explore our collection of Committed Innovator episode transcripts on McKinsey.com: Strategic Growth & Innovation
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34 min
February 12, 2025 Closing the gap between innovation and go-to-market, with AWS’s Jelena Joffe Weil
McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Jelena Joffe Weil, the founder and worldwide leader of the Venture Innovation program at AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, about how AWS works to close the gap between innovation and go to market for start-ups and large enterprises. The global hyperscaler is known for helping businesses grow and scale rapidly, but it also helps start-ups and established enterprises find each other to engage in open, or collaborative, innovation.

Related insights:

Driving innovation with generative AI

Taking fear out of innovation

How to take the measure of innovation

Fielding high-performing innovation teams

Explore our collection of Committed Innovator episode transcripts on McKinsey.com: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/inside-the-strategy-room-podcast/strategic-growth-and-innovation

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32 min
October 22, 2024 Child and adolescent mental health as proving ground for innovation
In this episode of The Committed Innovator, McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with the founder, president, and medical director of the Child Mind Institute in New York City, Dr. Harold Koplewicz. At a time of increasing concerns globally about child and adolescent mental health, the institute is working to use advanced imaging technologies and AI to help revolutionize diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, and psychological and learning disorders.
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36 min
August 21, 2024 Helping India’s e-commerce leapfrog into the future
McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Shiprocket cofounder and CEO Saahil Goel about how he built his e-commerce logistics company into a highly successful platform that is helping launch new entrepreneurs all over India.
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39 min
June 24, 2024 March Capital’s Wes Nichols talks about innovating on the frontlines of technological change
Rapid technological innovation heightens opportunity for investors. Serial entrepreneur and investor Wes Nichols shares the factors he looks for in but choosing the right start-ups and entrepreneurs to back. Nichols is best known for starting MarketShare, the marketing resource allocation software solution. Today he is a partner at March Capital, the growth-stage venture capital firm that focuses on enterprise technology companies.
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35 min
May 13, 2024 Innovation in video gaming with Electronic Arts’ Chief Strategy Officer Mihir Vaidya
Innovation in online gaming requires keeping up with a broad mix of changes, including digital advances, audience desires, and artistic trends. In this episode of The Committed Innovator podcast, McKinsey innovation expert Erik Roth talks with Mihir Vaidya, the chief strategy officer of Electronic Arts, about these unique aspects of innovating in the gaming industry.
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31 min

About The Committed Innovator

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Unsung heroes of innovation and deeply experienced innovators discuss their triumphs, trials, and lessons learned with Erik Roth, the global leader of McKinsey's Growth and Innovation practice.