By Shae Whittle | Reporter
The Innovative Business podcast, hosted by marketing specialist Bo Mello and assistant director of content Justin Walker, earned the Communicators Award of Excellence and ranked in the top 30% of podcasts in the world — with only seven episodes under its belt.
The podcast started in January and summarizes research done by business professionals at the Hankamer School of Business.
“It’s all to promote the purposeful research that’s going on within the business school that has real-world implications,” Walker said. “That was our goal, and I think that we’ve been fortunate enough to achieve that.”
As a business student himself during his time at Baylor, Mello recalled professors who urged him and his classmates to provide a platform for people to talk about the things they’re doing. Mello approached Walker about the possibility of making this a reality by turning interviews about research and findings into an easily accessible podcast.
Mello and Walker formed their co-host relationship and began the production process in late 2022, with Walker primarily in charge of planning the interview and Mello handling the editing and production of each episode. The entire process, from planning to execution, takes around six hours.
“We don’t walk away from a podcast unless we understand it. That’s kind of our litmus test,” Mello said. “If we are still like, ‘I have no idea,’ then we haven’t done it right. When we can walk away and go, ‘OK, we got it. I feel like we had a good, productive conversation. That made sense,’ that is how we kind of determine if we’ve hit our mark.”
The layout of the podcast is broken up into five episodes over the course of one semester, with four research pieces and one non-research piece. An interview with Pat Bray, the business school’s chaplain, is the most recent non-research piece and is a favorite of Mello’s, he said.
When it came to being awarded for excellence in the category of “Individual Episodes — Educational Instruction” in the 2023 Communicator Awards, Mello and Walker said they were shocked. They submitted their podcast with only one episode released to the public and had low expectations going in; however, they won the entire category.
In addition, Mello and Walker learned that the Innovative Business podcast stood within the top 30% of podcasts in the world and has grown ever since.
“Our goal was to, like we said earlier, present this research that is purposeful, that is making an impact in the world, to the people it’s having an impact on so that they can impact the world through their careers and their jobs,” Walker said. “And I think that the fact that it is in the top 30%, that it is winning awards, is proving to us that we are doing that. We have succeeded in our goal. But that doesn’t mean that we get to stop working toward that. We want to continue to get better.”
