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Local tech executive John McDonald has taken a job in Oklahoma, but he said he still plans to stay connected to Next Studios, the Indianapolis-based innovation studio he co-founded in 2020.
McDonald began work last week at Tulsa Innovation Labs, an organization that launched in 2020 to advance that city’s economic development and workforce goals with a focus on the areas of energy technology, virtual health, advanced air mobility and cyber security/data analytics. The organization is funded by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation.
Jennifer Hankins, managing director of Tulsa Innovation Labs, said McDonald is the first of a handful of hires to build the organization’s executive leadership team. The executives, Hankins said, will be tasked with helping Tulsa Innovation Labs develop its organizational strategies and capacity as the organization matures.
Hankins said her organization found McDonald via a recruiter and was impressed by his focus on team-building and public-private partnerships.
“John’s already been an invaluable person on our team,” Hankins said. “We’re just excited to have him out here.”
McDonald said his main priority right now is his new job in Tulsa, although he doesn’t intend to walk away from Next Studios. His responsibilities largely have been redistributed, but he will keep a hand in work at the firm.
Next offers a variety of innovation- and entrepreneurship-based services for both established companies and entrepreneurs looking to refine and launch their ideas. The organization also helps connect entrepreneurs with philanthropically sourced venture funding.
“My life has been [about] juggling many things, and will obviously continue to be so,” McDonald said. “I’ll still be a partner in Next.”
McDonald added that he has no immediate plans to sell his home in Fishers. “We’re not pulling up stakes and replanting them yet,” he said. “I mean, who knows what the future may bring, but that is certainly not the circumstance today.”
Megan Bearry, the finance and operations partner at Next, said the studio is “looking forward to [McDonald’s] advice and help as he can with the projects that we on the studio team are working on.”
Before co-founding Next, McDonald served as CEO of Fishers-based tech company ClearObject, a company that he founded in 2010 under the name CloudOne. McDonald left ClearObject following a 2019 ownership change, when two out-of-state private equity firms took a majority stake in the company.
Among his other local connections, McDonald is also a founding board member at the Indiana Technology & Innovation Association and is an instructor in Purdue University’s entrepreneurship and innovation certificate program.
McDonald said he intends to share with Tulsa some of the things he’s learned through his involvement in Indiana’s tech and entrepreneurship initiatives. Likewise, he said, Tulsa might offer a few lessons useful to Indiana.
“I’m just super-excited about the opportunity to take what we’ve learned in Indiana and apply it in a different geography,” McDonald said. “It’s going to make what we’re doing in Indiana better, because we’re going to learn some stuff here, too.”
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