About Nick Jankel
Purpose-Driven Innovator
Serial Ethical Entrepreneur
Empowerment & Culture Designer
Leadership & Collaboration Coach & Teacher
Professional Inspirational Speaker
Writer (FT, Guardian)
Broadcaster (BBC, MTV, Radio 1)
"You'll never discover new lands, unless you can leave sight of the shore. Nick acts as both a compass and a Gale Force 9 wind!"
Peter Wright, Marketing Director, Tesco PLC
Nick, founder of WECREATE, works at the confluence of innovation, leadership and the collective good. He is focused on providing organizations the training, coaching, design processes and learning they need to co-create a flourishing world with purpose-driven projects and enterprises.
Nick was a science teacher in rural Africa by the time he was 18; a prize-winning scholar at Cambridge University by the age of 20; had set up a strategy and innovation consultancy which helped launch Xbox globally and create Dancing with Stars by the age of 25; built it into a multi-million pound company, advising No.10 Downing Street and some of the fastest-moving Fortune 500 companies before he was 30; and by the time he was 31 he had exited the profit motive to be a committed ethical entrepreneur dedicated to supporting the co-creation of a radically better world through innovation, enterprise and empowerment.
Nick is now the Founder and President of WECREATE. He works and collaborates with national governments (European Union, No.10 Downing Street, BIS, Welsh Assembly, Singapore Government), public institutions (the National Health Service, various Councils and Government Bodies, NESTA, The Design Council) and non-profits (Oxfam, The Bay Area Hub, British Heart Foundation, Young Foundation) on purpose-driven projects and capacity building programs. He runs the flagship Impact Accelerator for social entrepreneurs and social innovators to maximise the scale and importance of their impact which has now run in Kenya, California, Denmark and London; and he has taught social innovation and social entrepreneurship on 4 continents and at many of the top business schools in the world.
Nick also develops his own empowerment projects, focused on peer-to-peer empowerment, micro social entrepreneurship and mental wellbeing. His passion is to improve the leadership skills, creative confidence and emotional intelligence of the disadvantaged at scale. He has received major funding from the European Social Fund, The European Union, BBC Learning, BBC Knowledge and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) for his social innovation projects. Frustrated by the lack of breakthrough innovation in the social space, he founded the influential global networking and knowledge community Disruptive Social Innovators that grew to 2000 members in 30 countries before Facebook disappeared the group without warning. This is a specialist subject he researches, teaches and consults on, publishing an influential series of papers that look at the space. He was a Trustee for Interact Worldwide (formerly Population Concern), a female health and sexual rights NGO working across the poorest parts of the globe.
Nick is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Ambassador for Entrepreneurship for the UK; a Visiting Fellow of Bath and Exeter Universities and his ideas, projects and enterprises have been featured in the Sunday Times, The Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The RSA Journal and in many industry titles such as Advertising Age and Marketing Week. He is a professional and prolific speaker on innovation, collaboration and social enterprise (represented by Speakers Corner in Europe and the prestigious Washington Speakers Bureau in the USA) giving keynotes and lectures at places as diverse as Oxford University, SOCAP, Social Enterprise Coalition, The Economist, University College London, SciFoo Camp (at Google), Novartis, The Institute of Directors, The European Parliament and The Kaos Pilots. He has taught innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship on the MBA programs of 5 of the top 10 UK Business Schools and the Executive MBAs of British Airways and Ford Motor Cars. He writes for The Guardian on social innovation and has been a Judge on the Orange National Innovation Awards. He is currently a judge on the European Media Awards. He has published an extremely influential paper on ethnographic and human-centred innovation techniques in a major peer-review journal. He holds a Triple First Class degree in Medicine & History & Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and has recently starred as a leadership coach in his own BBC TV show. He is currently working on a number of TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic and is negotiating his first book deal with the help of William Morris Endeavor. He recently spent two years in California developing projects with a rare O1 Extraordinary Ability Visa for social innovation and creative business.
As the largest drinks company in the world, Diageo’s global reach and reputation allow us the freedom to select any agency or consultancy to work with. Nevertheless we have consistently chosen to work with Nick because of his extraordinary creativity, his thought leadership in all things to do with innovation and his unmatched history of success as an innovation consultant.
Andy Fennell, Chief Marketing Officer
DIAGEO PLC (Smirnoff, Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Gordon’s, Jose Cuervo, etc)
Nick has worked on projects with me at the BBC as an innovation consultant and I have come to recognize him as a leading expert in the field. I have also watched Nick skillfully transfer his knowledge and expertise as an innovation consultant into the role of TV presenter.
Wayne Garvie, Managing Director, BBC Worldwide
Nick spoke at the launch of a major European Parliament program on ethical entrepreneurship. We were looking for someone at the forefront of thinking and we needed someone who could communicate those ideas with authority, with conviction, and with personal experience as a social entrepreneur.
Thomas Dodd, Director for Enterprise and Industry, European Commission
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Nick initially chose to apply his passion for philosophy, psychology and anthropology to real life by becoming a creative strategist at TBWA / Chiat Day, a top 5 global creative agency. After working on a number of youth and tech brands, including launching PlayStation 2, he founded his own strategic innovation and human insight consultancy in 1999, initially working with fast-moving tech entrepreneurs and dot coms to help them create much-needed brands, business models and corporate cultures. One of his first big wins was the global brand strategy for Xbox. Through turbulent times he grew the company into a world-class agency with millions in billings and a team of 50 working with many of the greatest innovators on the planet (Diageo, Shell, Kraft, P&G, Vodafone, Disney, BBC, Universal, IBM, Mars, O2 and many many more) to create new products and services key to the future of their companies. Here he pioneered the use of anthropology in innovation, designed new strategy and innovation tools to solve emerging challenges that conventional approaches failed to answer (such as how to get R&D scientists to create breakthrough consumer-led products), developed new thinking in scenario planning, as well as designed the in-house innovation programs for thousands of employees of Tesco and Cadburys. Through these experiences he begun to fully appreciate the full potential of innovation, leadership and collaboration tools to create a better world (and happier people), and not just better products and profits for multi-nationals. Soon after he rekindled his original commitment to public betterment that had begun 15 years earlier when he committed to being a doctor. With this epiphany Nick found his true purpose. He exited the company and founded WECREATE.
More recently he has starred on BBC and MTV shows as a leadership coach. He has recently launched a multi-platform media business / transformational travel enterprise - THE ULTIMATE TRIP - that celebrates the ability of rich and diverse cultural experiences to transform us so we are better able to thrive when we return home. This has been inspired by his own experiences as an extreme traveller and consumer researcher in over 40 countries; and an initial life-changing experience as a school teacher in poverty-stricken rural Zimbabwe when he was just 18. The project includes guided trips, branded TV content and an online community and can be explored at http://www.ultimatetrip.tv.
Visit his personal coaching and transformation site here.
