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259: Innovate to Success with Nick Jain

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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Listen to the podcast here

 

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, rather than just the ideas of the loudest people in the room.

I am one of those people that will always get drawn into a funny cat video. So I’m so glad you mentioned that. As a self-described innovation evangelist, you were really humble with me in our pre-interview in describing your freakishly high IQ. You really didn’t want to talk about it. I’m going to ask you to talk about it and how you leverage that in both your business and in your personal life?

In my personal life, I was, well, I’m on and off a reasonably competitive poker player. I stopped playing because I have other priorities in life. Yeah, I’m about to have a kid, so I’d rather spend time with my wife and my future child. But being very good at math and very able to think through things logically without a lot of emotion involved is an incredibly powerful skill in poker. In my professional life, I think it helps in a few ways, right? Number one, it allows you to really be centered on why things are happening rather than use fuzzy logic. And that’s a pitfall that a lot of businesses fall into, that they proceed down a strategy or an action or tactic because someone said something that sounds good. So having kind of studied mathematics and a very logical way of thinking about things, it’s very easy to say, wait, that doesn’t actually make sense. And you can discover that on the fly before decisions are made, because often once a decision is made, it’s too late. So you have to react in real time. And I think that's where some micro training and background really helps in the world of business. Share on X

So some people may be questioning why I asked you that if you really didn’t want to talk about it. But I think it’s really important because we often typecast extremely intelligent people as not having social skills, as not being able to use their EQ, and you obviously step outside of that typecast. You have strong social skills, and I can tell you, I would imagine you rate really high in emotional intelligence. So that’s why I wanted to bring this forward. And I don’t usually have people talk about something that makes them terribly uncomfortable. But thank you for diving and deeper as to how that really helps you both in your personal life with that pending baby and in your business life. One question I often ask CEOs or leaders is what are three words that you present when you are your best? When you are adding the most value, what are three words?

Sure. So I would say I’m principled, I’m logical, and I’m fair. So when I’m at my best, I think those three words represent me quite well.

Yeah. So let’s dig into those. Principled. How does that show up? How do you show up when you are exhibiting being principled?

So the way we try and run IdeaScale is we have a very clear set of principles that I’ve laid out on what matters to the organization. Number one, we’re trying to create value for our three core constituents, which is our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. That’s the principle. So every action we take has to help all three of those parties. Second is we make business decisions that actually create value. So they expand the pie, and there’s a specific equation or way you run a software company that does that. So when we make decisions, again, there’s a principle. We’re not going to do a decision that violates how a software company should grow. And there’s some deep research on this that’s been known for decades. What I mean by principles, and that’s my personal life, too.

I have ethical principles or business principles, and I try and run my personal life by them, too. Share on X

And those are clearly articulated both in my personal life and my professional life. These are the principles IdeaScale runs by. In terms of fair, it kind of ties into my principle thing, but I’m a big believer that you don’t have to cheat to get ahead. Right. Yes, sometimes cheating to get ahead makes life easier, but that’s not one of my principles. And I’d rather do things fairly in life where everyone wins rather than you have to screw someone to win. And that’s true both in a one on one interaction as well as in a corporate interaction. So certainly, in a negotiation, I will be aggressive for my side, but I will not endeavor to screw anybody over who’s sitting on the other side, which I think is sometimes different in the world of business where it’s always me, people always think in a us versus them perspective, I generally try and grow the pine, reach something fair. And logical, right? I try and make almost no decision, no meaningful decisions in my life based on emotion, right? So I may pick a candy bar based on temptation or because I’m hungry at that moment. That’s probably not the greatest, most logical decision for my health to have a bag of chips, but any meaningful decision, right? Like, hey, who do I want to be married to? Where do I want to live? How do I want to invest my money? How do I want to run IdeaScale? Those serious decisions are entirely run or almost exclusively run based on logic rather than feelings, which I think allows me to have fewer regrets after the fact.

Fantastic. Principled, logical, and fair. All characteristics that leadership need to exhibit, if not all the time, at least most of the time. I ask you if you would share with us a process or step process that you use in your leadership and decision-making. And you offered something you call ICE. Please share with us, describe ICE for us.

Sure, so it’s a three-letter acronym that basically means, says innovate, collaborate, and execute. And it’s both a process and a philosophy. And I’ll try to describe both elements. The first step is innovate. And this is the idea that you basically need to get better every single day, whether you’re an individual or you’re an organization. And the reason is twofold. A, it feels good to get better at whatever you do, whether you’re playing basketball, whether you’re running a company, whether you’re an entrepreneur. But secondly, in a more kind of paranoid way, if you’re not getting better, your competitors certainly are. So there is a strong motivation to innovate at whatever you’re doing. And it’s also a necessity. Second is collaborate. Innovation we often incorrectly think of or getting better, let’s use the word getting better innovation interchangeably. We often think of that as an individual process, somebody, a lone genius having a eureka moment in the shower or somebody at the gym, or running by themselves for hundreds of hours a day or a week becoming a ultra marathoner. That is often not how true excellence happens, right? If you think of Olympic athletes, they’re not just very rarely do you find a freakish talent who just works by themselves. They all had coaches, they had organizations behind them. So they need to collaborate. Innovation is no different, right? Whether you’re running a hardware store or a billion dollar software company, you need the input and support of a broad array of people. Impact, truly meaningful impact, doesn’t happen by yourself, it happens through an agglomeration of collaboration of people. And then execution is the third step, which is, look, it’s great to have ideas, it’s great to have a vision, it’s great to have a bunch of people collaborating, you actually have to do something at the end of it, right? Do something in the real world, build something, go do something, get better at the gym, go lift those weights. After all that planning and thinking and collaborating, go build it.

Absolutely. And build it, you have done. Let’s dig in a little deeper about IdeaScale again. When a potential client or customer reaches out to you, what is their profile? What does that look like?

Sure. So I would divide our customers into kind of three groups. Number one is small organizations. If you’re below 100 people, our software is totally free for you to use, whether you’re a solopreneur with a Gmail address or you’re a 99% organization. You can just go use our software. Then our two kind of paying customer profiles, I would break into two different groups. One is public sector or nonprofits, and then the second is private sector. So in the public sector, firstly, we are the largest provider of innovation software to the entire US federal government, and I think maybe as well to state governments already. The challenges they’re facing is obviously government needs to innovate, but it’s under a lot of constraints to do. So data privacy constraints, legal constraints, they’re often unionized. There’s lots of additional constraints. So our government customers are saying, look, we’re these large complex organizations that have in some cases been around for 200 years. Like the U.S. Post Office, isn’t that a Ben Franklin invention 250 years ago? I feel I should know that living in Philly. So our first group of kind of very typical customers is large government organizations that are important. They meaningfully impact hundreds of millions of Americans each year. but they’re struggling to innovate in a way that is systematic, but also respectful of the constraints they’re under. The second group of our customers that’s very typical is large private sector organizations, think like Pfizer or Comcast. These are real customers bars. And what they’re trying to do is just they realize that they need to innovate or die, right? If they’re not innovating, their customers are. Nike is unfortunately, for example, going through some challenges right now because they didn’t innovate as fast as other apparel companies did. So they know that they need to innovate, they do have they are trying to innovate already, but they need a way to do so much more systematically. And in a way that doesn’t just rely on the 10 lead designers at Nike or the 10 lead designers at McDonald’s or whatever, you want to be able to tap the collective intellect of your ecosystem, because that is the power of a million people’s minds is a lot better than the power of your 10 smartest people’s minds no matter how smart those 10 people are.

I love that. Successful leaders aren’t on an island all by themselves. They have trusted advisors, they have other people that they bounce ideas off. You don’t have to disclose any particular names, but who do you turn to when you’re trying to make decisions? What types of other leaders are you interacting with to get inspiration?

So a few things. Number one, I’m a big believer in reading academic research. So I try to absorb all the great knowledge from people who have written it down and like done so in a very thoughtful, researched way, not just their feelings about leadership. The second is a group of my college friends that have gone through different walks in life. Some are in academia, some are in business, some are in finance, some are in nonprofit. And they’re very well grounded because they know me personally very deeply. So they know, hey, this is something Nick is good at and this is something Nick is terrible at. So we’re not going to recommend Nick take an action that is not natural for him or not applying to his strengths. Third is obviously my wife. She is a very smart person, knows me very deeply. Can tell me when I’m not emotionally centered or being as thoughtful as I can. Fourth is a couple of business school professors that I’ve stayed in touch with. And then fifth is my chairman. Especially at IdeaScale, I am very, very fortunate that my chairman is a really smart guy. He’s a serial entrepreneur, has built several companies. He is both the entrepreneur as well as now the leader of multiple large, I forget, like tens of millions of dollars of revenues of organizations and several that he’s built himself, including IdeaScale, which he then handed the keys to me at some point. So having access to somebody like that who’s actually done it and who’s built companies successfully repeatedly is a privilege to have access to.

It does take a team. So in addition to those live, real people, who do you read, follow, do you admire as a leader or an author and can be that additional spark or source of inspiration? Is there any one particular person when you see that they’ve published something or they’ve put something out in video format or do something like, okay, I’m going to make time for that? Anyone come to mind?

Yes, there’s one individual called Aswath Damodaran. He’s a professor of finance at NYU, the university. The good news is he’s incredibly thoughtful, puts out really good stuff. He’s considered the godfather of valuations. If you’re doing anything in, if you’re a senior executive in corporate America finance, you should definitely read his book. It’s called The Bible of Corporate Finance. The challenge is it’s a heavy,  he writes heavy stuff that requires not math. You don’t need to like anything more than high school math to read and understand, but it’s not something you can sit there in a cafe with a cup of coffee. You need to be like, in a quiet place. You probably need to be taking notes. If you try and listen to him on audio or try and listen to an audio book or an AI reading his books, it’ll go over your head. It certainly goes over mine. So incredibly valuable, really useful if you want to lead a company, whether it be a small like mom and pop hardware store or a multi-billion dollar organization. Incredibly well researched, well thoughtful, and he doesn’t add a lot of fluff. So it’s like really information dense. But again, it’s not a book that you read on a flight or in an airport or as you’re as you’re dozing off to bed.

Got it. We have been forewarned, but now I am intrigued. And we’ll have to look up some of this information. I’m really curious, for the people that you are hiring for IdeaScale, what constant or what common threads, what characteristics do you look for for people to be successful at IdeaScale?

Sure. We have a bit of a weird process here where we generally don’t care which school you went to or which walks of life you’re coming from, whether you worked at famous companies or no-name companies. Our hiring process instead focuses, I think, on a few core elements. Number one, real skills. Do you have real skills at whatever you do, whether that be marketing, whether that be security, whether it be programming? So if you went to MIT and you don’t have marketing skills, we’re not hiring you for a marketing role just because you went to MIT. Obviously a great university, but that doesn’t matter to us. We’re looking for your skills, not your brand names. Second is ethics. Look, we’re remote. We’ve been a remote-first organization even before COVID, so you place a lot of trust in employees that they’re not stealing your data, that they’re actually doing work, that they’re being productive. Third is communication. Again, this ties into being remote-first. We rely on, you know, the joke is push notification. You tell your boss or your colleagues when something is wrong or when you need help, because they can’t, they shouldn’t need to ask you all the time. You need to be able to communicate proactively and clearly, right? I also don’t want somebody writing me a six-page email when they could write two bullets and say, Nick, this is broken, help me, right?

I don't need to know the six-page back history. So that's part of effective communication. Share on X

And then a commitment to learning is probably the fourth, I lost count, but the fourth skill set, which is you need someone who, look, we’re an innovation company. We believe you have to be better tomorrow, both as an individual and as an organization. And I certainly want that in my employees because number one, it’s a philosophy thing or a principle thing at IdeaScale. But number two, it’s very practical because the skills that are relevant today in almost any role are very different from those that will be relevant in four or five years. A very simple example is coming up with great images or social media tags was a very useful skill three years ago, right? Coming up with a cute, quirky social media tags or posts. Today, that is 100% doable via any AI that you use, and it’ll be much better than the best human being social media writer. So, like, the existence of a social media manager, that used to be a job, and it just isn’t. And if you haven’t been able to adapt to your skills, to the current environment, then you’re less relevant today and perhaps unemployable. And that is also true, for example, in more technical roles like engineering, where our software engineers need to be able to use these generative AI tools, not just in software, like new programming languages, generative AI tools, automated quality assurance tools. If they’re not learning these skills, they’re already out of date in like three or four years. So that’s really important in any role that you’re always allocating time to learn, excited about learning, but also proactively allocating time to learn.

I love it. So let me review those really quickly. You have to have real skills. You have to be able to do something, not just have something on paper. Ethics, they need to have an ethical framework, communication skills, and they need to be innovative. Does that sum it up?

Yeah, innovative/continuous learning. I kind of blur the lines there.

I love it. All right. What have I not asked you that I should have asked you, either about your journey or IdeaScale?

Sure. So, I think the one thing you haven’t asked me is kind of what is the secret to our successes at IdeaScale. And I think it’s, there’s a common thread there, which is, you know, it sounds almost mundane, but working incredibly hard, right? So at IdeaScale, or sorry, I personally work really hard. I’m working 80 to 100 hour weeks consistently on top of managing my personal life and my personal obligations. But that also is how IdeaScale works for our clients. There’s a lot of software companies out there, a lot of great products, but one of the ways we differentiate ourselves is we’re just willing to outwork our competition. A simple example is a big customer of ours a year ago had an issue where they believed our software was not as accessible to people with disabilities as it should be. From the moment they identified it, it took us two days, including me personally involved, every single day on communication, saying, like, okay, here’s the plan. Here’s how we’re going to fix it. It’s going to take us six weeks to fix it. And every week you’re going to get an update, both from the technical team, as well as from me. I’m going to personally be watching it. And very few companies are going to give you that level of reaction. This was not a big client where they’re paying all our paychecks. This was just the right thing to do where we are demonstrating like, you raised a legitimate issue. We care about having our software be legally compliant, as well as accessible to people with disabilities. It matters to customers, it matters to us ethically. And so we’re going to just work our butts off and fix this as quickly as possible. And I think that is a mentality that really helps us succeed and demonstrate value to our clients.

Fantastic. Nick, I have learned so much, and I’m sure some of our listeners have learned some things. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you if they want to know even more?

Sure, two ways. Number one, you can go to ideascale.com. Again, our software is totally free. If you’re below 100 people, just click Get Started Free. You’re ready to use in less than two minutes. Super easy to use and set up, entirely online, so nothing to download or install. Secondly, if you want to get in touch with me personally, two best ways are on LinkedIn. My name is Nick Jain. I respond to 100% of messages there, so feel free to DM me. Or alternatively, you can email me directly at nick.jain@ideascale.com.

Fantastic, thank you so much for carving out some of your busy time, and I look forward to maybe some future conversations.

 

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