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Business leaders need to stay current by continually watching, listening, and learning.   Staying up to date is especially hard in the digital world with the volume of information; and speed of change in almost every industry (see CDS’s interview with Nicholas Carr on information overload ). Reading through trade journals, news reports, industry updates, and blogs can be time consuming. One way to stay tuned is to make Podcast listening part of your life. Podcasting is disrupting traditional broadcast audio by offering free, niche, but increasingly good quality content available when you are.  More importantly, podcasts are a low time investment way to gain summaries of important ideas, and to increase the range of information you gain access.
The benefits are clear:

• Great add-on. There are times when you can’t read. Commuting? Exercising? Stuck on a plane? Walking the dog? Instead of listening to redundant news reports or Katie Perry, why not learn something?
• Thousands of choices.  Choose from mainstream casts like NPR or 60 Minutes to niche programs like those focused on Kickstarter, contemporary witchcraft, sci-fi lit, or Paleo dieting. iTunesU offers complete courses and is the largest online catalogue of educational  digital content in the world, (including the CDS’s itunes channel.) GigaOM offers a fantastic tech resource and TWiT (This Week In Tech) is strictly all about the tech news that changes the industry.  You name it and there’s probably a podcast for it. If not, maybe you’ve just discovered your next innovation opportunity.
• Listen at your own speed. Search old issues. Skip around in the podcast. Stop and restart later on. Come up to speed on an issue offline, or get comfortable with new terminology like retargeting; cyber-physical systems (CPS), or adaptive learning.
• Topic immersion.  Much like catching up on Breaking Bad before the final episode, Podcasts allow you to binge on a particular topic from different angles, making you conversant in a short period of time.
• Easy mining. Great apps like Stitcher make finding and organizing podcasts a snap. Show Notes and RSS feeds provide helpful reference for what the show covers.

At Big Idea Group, we constantly preach about becoming category experts. Why not pick some categories and learn more? As a starter, you might try a few of these podcasts related to design and innovation that are on my Stitcher:
• 99% Invisible
• Design Matters
• Let’s Make Mistakes
• BackStory
• Science Friday
• The New Disruptors
• The Critical Path
Guest blogger, Michael Collins, is CEO of The Big Idea Group.