Nicole Velik is a globally recognised creativity and innovation speaker, facilitator, and trainer. As the founder of The Ideas Bodega, host of Creativity Unpacked: The Podcast, and the force behind CreativeMornings Sydney, she’s on a mission to make creativity exciting, accessible, and essential for everyone.
For 17 years, Nicole has helped organisations around the world- from the U.S. to Australia, Asia, Europe and Africa - supercharge their creative potential through workshops, talks and training. Her clients include The United Nations, Nike, Apple, Canva, LEGO, Spotify, Coca-Cola, TikTok, and Google.
Nicole believes creativity isn’t a gift for the lucky few, it’s a skill we all have. Her high-energy sessions leave audiences buzzing with confidence and ready to generate game-changing ideas.
Her podcast, Creativity Unpacked, debuted at No. 1 in the Apple Marketing charts and stayed there for six weeks. Through in-depth conversations with brilliant creatives, Nicole demystifies the creative process, proving that innovation isn’t magic, it’s something we can all tap into.
With a background in advertising as a brand strategist, Nicole worked at Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney and KBP New York City before returning home in 2008 to pursue her passion for building creative workplace cultures. In 2009, she founded The Ideas Bodega, blending her love for ideas, innovation, and empowering people to think differently.
Nicole is a sought-after speaker at global conferences, including SXSW Sydney, Vivid Ideas, Ad:Tech, Promax BDA, CreativeMornings, Creative Innovation, CREA, and Emergence Creative. Nicole’s insights on creativity and innovation have been featured in The Australian Financial Review, ABC, CMO Magazine, Media Week, and The Collective Magazine.
For 8 years Nicole has hosted CreativeMornings Sydney - A monthly, global lecture series for the creative industry. Sydney is one of 240 cities around the world to take part.
When she’s not igniting creativity in others, she fuels her own by playing percussion in a 50-person samba band, writing songs, playing guitar, and learning Portuguese.
Talking Points
Creativity is Everyone's Business
The ability to think creatively is what gives people and organisations a competitive advantage in today's world. Creativity is what sets individuals and companies apart. Now more than ever people need to strengthen their creativity in order to successfully solve challenges big and small. The number one problem is that many people don't think they are creative. Nicole Velik is a strong believer that we are all creative and can't afford not to be.Creativity is Everyone's Business
In this keynote Nicole will bring out your natural creative talent. She will load you up with powerful tools and techniques that can be applied to any business challenge and show you how easy it is to come up with game changing creative ideas.
Nicole draws on her life experience from working in global advertising agencies in Sydney and New York, across many brands in all sectors and shares anecdotes that will inspire, entertain and leave you wanting to apply what you've learnt right away.
This keynote is intense, stimulating, fun and highly interactive - be ready for some audience participation. Your creative thinking ability will be challenged and stretched to a new level.
Leading Creativity: How to ignite creativity and innovation in your organisation
Do you think your team should be more creative? Did you know that a leaders actions and beliefs will decide if their team will be creative or not?Leading Creativity: How to ignite creativity and innovation in your organisation
Leaders have a significant impact on the creative culture. This keynote empowers individual leaders (and future leaders) with the beliefs, habits, initiatives and tangible actions they can take in order to turn their team into a creative hothouse.
Nicole Velik will show you simple ways to inject creativity into the workplace by bringing to life stories from some of the best organisations around the world. You will learn techniques that can be easily implemented in your organisation and see how one person can create an inspiring ideas culture.
This keynote is for leaders, managers and future leaders. It will be educational, inspiring, stimulating and highly interactive. Beware: Wanting to shake things up after this talk is a very likely side effect.
Video
Nicole Velik | Speaker on Creativity and Innovation at The Ideas Bodega
Nicole Velik is a creativity and innovation facilitator, trainer and consultant, and the Founder and Director of innovation company The Ideas Bodega. Nicole has facilitated and trained organisations across The United States, Australia and Asia. Her clients include The United Nations, Nike, BBDO, TBWA, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, JWT, Edelman, STW Group, Ogilvy PR, Hill + Knowlton, Foxtel, Seven Network, The Cancer Council, Colonial First State and One Green Bean. Nicole spent four years working in New York City where she helped her clients keep a competitive edge by thinking creatively and creating cultures where innovation would flourish. She recently returned to New York to work with her dream client, The United Nations. Her task was to arm them with creative thinking skills and generate big ideas for a UN global initiative, World Humanitarian Day. Nicole is a regular speaker on creativity and innovation and has educated, entertained and inspired audiences at global conferences such as Ad:Tech, Promax BDA, CREA and Emergence Creative.The session gave my team valuable tools and techniques for creative planning and brainstorming. It was a hugely beneficial process and I would highly recommend it to any organisation wishin ... keep reading One Green Bean, Sydney
Nicole's energy and passion for creativity and ideas were instantly apparent, and the professionalism and manner in which she presented resulted in a session which was very well received by the team, at all levels. Her ability to get participants to think laterally resulted in exciting and fresh thinking around some of our traditional challenges. The techniques she shared with us continue to be of great use to colleagues, and the office.
Nicole ran a two-day Idea Generation Masterclass for Hill+Knowlton Strategies, earlier this year, with incredible results. The team was thrilled with the workshop, with many claiming this to be one of the best they'd experienced, which is no mean feat considering the amount of training we run at H+K with some of the industry's biggest players. The impact has certainly been far-reaching across the business. On a professional level, I cannot recommend Nicole highly enough. The fact that she's also a great gal is just the icing on the cake!
Nicole came to Moon to host and facilitate a full day workshop on creative idea generation. I found the workshop to be both practical and entertaining - and she provided clear tools in order for all our attendees to be able to practically apply what they had learned over the course of the day. Nicole is also a very personable and pleasant person to have running the workshop, demonstrating leadership and encouraging collaboration appropriately. I would recommend her to any company wanting to learn motivating ways to generate new ideas.
Nicole is a highly motivational speaker who draws on her years of experience to very quickly build rapport with her audience. She has a clever way of helping people overcome their mental blocks to unleash their creative side. In the space of two hour she was able to get a room full of financial analysts and actuaries thinking creatively about developing workable solutions to help them overcome problems that will set them apart from their competitors.
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