Nick Jankel

Nick Jankel is a formidable keynote speaker, ethical entrepreneur, broadcaster and writer, and a world-leading expert on creativity, leadership and innovation mindsets.

Nick is a ‘formidable speaker’ and a ‘true master’ at helping individuals and organisations ‘switch on’ to the opportunities for growth, development and flourishing.

He believes innovation and leadership are the ‘double-helix’ underling all breakthrough creativity in life, in business and in society as a whole. He teaches that if we want to have breakthrough impact in the workplace and in the world then we have to have breakthrough ideas first.

Background and career

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 / Strictly Come Dancing with the BBC 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 realised that his true passion is to enlighten, empower and enable change-makers at all levels of society to co-create a radically better world through innovation and leadership, keynotes, lectures, training programmes, coaching engagements and in newspaper and magazine articles and TV and radio appearances.

Nick is the Founder and President of WECREATE, an ethical enterprise that works at the intersection of innovation, leadership and the collective good. He works with his team to build the capacity of individuals and organisations to ‘switch on’ to the world around them and find the opportunities for flourishing that lie dormant in every problem. He has worked and collaborated with national governments, public institutions, non-profits and companies on purpose-driven projects and capacity-building programs.

WECREATE also runs the flagship Impact Accelerator for entrepreneurs and innovators to maximise the scale and importance of their impact. He has taught innovation and entrepreneurship on 4 continents and at many of the top universities in the world. Nick also develops his own social projects focused on leadership, ethical entrepreneurship and mental wellbeing. His passion is to improve the leadership skills, creative confidence and emotional intelligence of the disadvantaged at scale so they can solve their own problems and never again be kept down.

He has received major funding for his social innovation projects. Frustrated by the lack of breakthrough innovation in the social space, he co-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.

Nick is 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 countless publications.

He is a professional and prolific speaker on innovation, collaboration and happiness (represented by Speakers Corner in Europe).

He has taught innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship on the MBA programs of top UK Business Schools and the Executive MBAs of British Airways and Ford Motor Cars.

He has judged the Orange National Innovation Awards and the the European Media Awards. He has published an extremely influential paper on ethnographic and human-centred innovation techniques in a major peer-review journal.

Nick also runs a thriving life coaching and human development business and recently starred as a psychological coach in his own BBC TV show. He also co-created the outreach programme for the BBC’s 3-year mental wellbeing mission. He is currently working on a number of TV shows and is writing his first book - The Switch.

Nick spent time in California developing projects with a rare O1 Extraordinary Ability Visa for social innovation and creative business.