https://youtu.be/T-aI91UGCWw
Nick Jain, CEO of IdeaScale, is driven by a mission to help organizations innovate to success by democratizing innovation, enabling them to crowdsource and rank ideas from their entire ecosystem.
We learn about Nick’s journey from growing up in India and building a career in private equity to leading IdeaScale, the largest innovation-focused software company globally. He explains the ICE Framework—Innovate, Collaborate, and Execute—a philosophy and process that encourages continuous improvement, teamwork, and actionable results. He highlights how IdeaScale helps organizations like Pfizer and the U.S. federal government overcome constraints and systematically tap into collective intelligence for impactful innovation. He also shares the company’s commitment to adaptability and hard work, providing responsive, high-touch solutions for customers.
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Innovate to Success with Nick Jain
Welcome everyone to the Management Blueprint Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Krista Crawford. My guest today is Nick Jain, CEO of IdeaScale, a leading innovation operating system designed as a platform for crowdsourcing ideas. Nick, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Krista. I'm excited to be here.
I am excited, too. And just for our listeners, we have had a short pre-interview, so we're going to be covering some things that we've already talked about, and you're also going to be adding some new information. We will dig into IdeaScale shortly. However, to begin, you and I had that pre-interview where you described your leadership journey. I am sure others would benefit from your story. Please share what you will.
Sure. So the quick summary of my background is I initially grew up in India, raised by a single grandmother to live up to the age of five, then did all my childhood education, small public high school in Canada, came to the U.S. for college, studied math and physics, spent the first 10 years of my career on Wall Street as a professional investor doing private equity deals and hedge fund deals. Went to business school at Harvard. And then for the past five or six years, I have either run or co-run companies in a bunch of different industries, ranging from a really big trucking company to a very small men's shoe company. And now I have the great honor and privilege of leading IdeaScale, the largest innovation-specific software company on the planet.
You mentioned IdeaScale. Go ahead. Give us a little teaser about what you actually do there.
Sure. So, well, I guess what I do is I'm the CEO, so I spend my time doing anything and everything, right, whether that means taking out the trash or doing marketing, coding, whatever's needed, right? What IdeaScale does, though, is really cool. What it allows any large, complex organization to do is to collect ideas from their entire ecosystem rather than just the people who sit in the boardroom. So a thing that a lot of companies struggle with is, hey, how do we get the ideas from people in our satellite offices who aren't necessarily super connected to the CEO or who are introverts or who don't speak the headquarters main language? And so our software helps you collect all of those ideas. And just like a social media platform, it'll help you rank those ideas. People can upvote and downvote those ideas. So the best ideas rise to the top.
No different than how a funny dance video rise to the top in TikTok or a cute cat image rises up in Instagram. But imagine this for much more impactful ideas that could be your company's new product. It could be you’re a new initiative for your nonprofit, a new way to serve your constituents as a government. And you can get those ideas from your entire ecosystem. That could be your employees, that could be your customers, your shareholders, the people you serve as a nonprofit. And what that results in is just a much more diverse group of ideas and also the best ideas rising to the top,