This is Part One of an interview I did with Mark Parker for SPARK.
Create an Innovative Environment
Nike is a company fixated on innovation. It’s what we look for in every idea, every project, and every relationship. We expect it of ourselves and respect it in others. I don’t consider it to be a fringe benefit or a lucky byproduct of our business. I consider it to be a prime directive, something I take very personally.
Sports is said to be a metaphor for life; we believe that. This is incredibly important to how we do business. On any day, in any event, at any game, anything can happen. World records snap in the blink of an eye. Vegas odds crumble when one athlete digs deeper than the rest. You have to have talent. You have to put in the hours training. And you have to believe. When you do, you unleash the power of possibility. This is the foundation of inspiration and innovation – the sense of possibility.
Creative Structure
Nike is a big company. We have 25,000 employees spread out across the world. In a sense, Nike is a society. It requires structure and guidelines to operate with any degree of efficiency. I don’t consider this a hindrance to innovation but rather a tool to pursue it. Leonardo da Vinci stands alone as a creative thinker, but much of his ability came about through studying the physical aspects of the senses. He was as interested in how the eyes worked as in what they saw. That kind of emphasis on structure can yield incredible gains in the creative process.
We have several organized and established advanced R&D groups. Engineers, developers, researchers and others who aren’t defined as creative in the classic sense of the word are responsible for a lot of divergent thinking. They embrace trial and error – always willing to take risks, to go down different paths and hit some dead ends, back up and re-group. And they learn from it all. That’s just the nature of the beast. Much of the innovation at Nike comes from these formal groups. At Nike, leadership and management understand this and support it.
