Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Equipping our team today and the talent of tomorrow.

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Responsible Supply Chain: Strengthening a more resilient global supply chain.

From The Record

In July of 2026, more than 10 hours into her race, ultra runner and ACG pro <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/trail-runner-yao-miao-is-running-down-new-goals-with-acg" target="_blank">Yao Miao</a> hit the final wall. Specifically, the eleventh and penultimate section of Camins d’Hèr, a 68-mile ultra race in Spain’s Pyrenees mountain range, which passes through the small localities of Arties to Escunhau, a distance of about 5 kilometers. The stretch is a grueling, exposed vertical climb that squeezes every last drop of mental fortitude out of a runner before they tackle the remaining 8 kilometers to the finish. Even the fittest athletes reliably bonk when they reach it.For Miao, the wall was simply one more obstacle to climb. She’d later cross the finish line, fist raised in the air, completing the race in 13:04:34, the course’s fastest-ever time in the women’s field. Yao Miao is one of the most accomplished racers of her generation. She’s one of only six runners worldwide to win two different UTMB finals events. But she also had a secret tool in her race prep: insights from the Nike Innovation Farm Team, an 18-strong ultra runner cohort who trained in a four-month residency at the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/nike-sport-research-lab-environmental-chambers" target="_blank">Nike Sport Research Lab</a> (NSRL) in Beaverton, Oregon.

A Nike team of applied physiologists combined the data from Miao’s springtime visit to the NSRL with a four-hour resilience run done by the Farm Team and crunched the numbers through a predictive model to map out the pace that would land her in a hypothetical finish window. They shared the formula with Miao in the weeks before Camins d’Hèr. The team estimated she'd finish between 12:37 and 13:44, and to put ink on a specific number, 13:09. She’d cross the arch in Vielha within five minutes of that prediction.Thanks in large part to the data from the Farm Team, there was less guesswork to the milestones Miao needed to hit. The group acted like a roster of teammates in her corner, bringing a sharper clarity to her plan.

And that was the whole point. The 15-week Nike Innovation Farm Team, which kicked off in April at Nike’s Philip H. Knight Campus, was created to help Nike innovators uncover the levers behind ultra-endurance running.The science of endurance performance under two hours is fairly well understood. The longer a runner goes, however, the less we know about what causes some to succeed and others to crumble. The standard factors of endurance performance become more dynamic, and unpredictable, especially in ultra-distance mountain running. The distances are outrageous. The terrain shape-shifts in a flash, covering high-altitude climbs and steep descents. There’s a mix of unforgiving surfaces, and the weather can change rapidly. What’s more, a race can last for days, and it’s largely a solo endeavor. You’re likely to be running by yourself for extended periods of time, sometimes for hours. The opportunities for a scientist to intervene naturally and observe how the runner’s body is negotiating the work are few.

What the Farm Team gave Nike researchers was a rare 15-week window to dig into all aspects of the sport and, maybe most important, its elusive performance enhancer: resilience.“In a race, everyone slows down over 13 hours,” says Brett Kirby, PhD, Senior Principal Scientist of Applied Performance Innovation in the Nike Sport Research Lab. “The winner is the one who slows down the least. In other words, the most resilient runner wins. We wanted to study resilience in three main ways: physiologically, biomechanically and psychologically.”With the Farm Team, NSRL scientists wanted to create a realistic, uninterrupted environment to gather enough data to better understand this resilience. The bonus was that the outcomes of their studies should help all runners dial in their training. This could be picking the right program (e.g., what could help you blast through an uphill sprint in hour eight of a race), or the right product to wear for a race course. This scientific foundation for new product solutions extends beyond the pros too, and can help any runner who hits the wall of the mountain and wants to break through.

Nike’s vast backyard in the Pacific Northwest became the Farm Team’s research center. They were embedded in the NSRL and set free in the surrounding Portland area, including the sprawling Forest Park trails and the stunning routes in the Columbia River Gorge.&nbsp;“Time under effort is the variable that makes or breaks an ultra runner’s race,” says Brad Winn, Lead Researcher of Applied Innovation, who served as the program’s head coach over the 15-week protocol. “Time is also the critical piece on the research side. We wanted to spend as much of it with these athletes as possible.”

The program’s name came from two places. One borrows from the farm team concept popular in sports like baseball, where a farm team serves as an important talent pipeline for a franchise. The other comes from one of Nike’s foundational employees, Jeff Johnson. In the mid ’90s, he and Stanford track coach Vin Lananna co-founded the esteemed sub-elite distance-running track team, in many ways a precursor to today’s track clubs. Both inspirations draw from the same purpose: to explore how a dedicated pipeline can, through athlete talent and the exploration of their potential, improve a larger community.There were 18 spots, nine men and nine women, up for grabs on the Farm Team’s roster, and runners applied online beginning in March 2026. Criteria for the program was strict. Selected runners needed to complete all 15 weeks of training, and have the ability to run up to four hours at a sub-elite pace. Nike Innovation received thousands of applications, and had the daunting task of selecting the handful who would be invited to relocate full-time to Beaverton.

The residency’s embedded nature was undoubtedly a challenge. “Moving away for four months has been difficult, on top of working a full-time job," says Alec Hewett, a Farm Team runner who works as a Senior Manager of National Teams at USA Triathlon and is in his first year of marriage. "But the sacrifices were still a no-brainer for me and my wife. Having full support from her and from my job has been awesome.”The 18 runners were divided into two cohorts, each focusing on a different training protocol over 10 weeks. One was a concentric-dominant, more traditional uphill program (concentric refers to the shortening of the muscle under force). The other was an eccentric-dominant program, or one that focused on the lengthening of the muscle under force, translating into downhill workouts. In addition to run-specific workouts, both groups applied their concentric or eccentric focus to assigned strength training workouts. The eccentric groups, for example, would do lifts like descending lunges, paying close attention to the lowering of the weights, whereas the concentric group did a contrasting lift, like a weighted step-up.&nbsp;

The team was given a full array of Nike’s diagnostic tools in the NSRL to help scientists better grasp what was happening under the hood of each runner. For example, every runner’s gait was analyzed through <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/nike-nsrl-form" target="_blank">Nike Form</a>, an algorithmic tool developed in-house by the NSRL to study a runner’s unique biomechanics. Through this data, scientists could study the athletes’ mechanics during long runs, how training impacted their mechanics over the course of the study, how their body interacted with footwear over time, and how race simulations impacted fatigue. After 10 weeks of training, each baseline test was measured again, charting how runners progressed their fitness according to their program.&nbsp;The Farm Team played an important role in testing some of the latest breakthroughs coming out of Nike Innovation, like the recently announced Picklejus, the new ACG model with a cushioning system optimized for big-mountain racing. The roster tested the shoes in the lab, trialing Picklejus during a challenging four-hour treadmill test with changes in both speed and gradient to simulate mountain-like terrain.The team’s comments on the shoe and, specifically, their ability to describe in clear terms what they needed to feel from it helped show what was working well. For example, many runners voiced a need for protective stability without sacrificing snappiness for uphill surges. The Farm Team also tested apparel prototypes that ACG pros like Miao wore for her Camins d’Hèr race.With a trove of scientific data over the 15-week residency (the Nike Form sessions alone gathered some 13 gigabytes of data per runner) the insights move in all directions. They travel down to the general product level and move up to ACG’s roster of pros, who are wringing every possible advantage out of their pre-race training, race-day strategy and post-race recovery.&nbsp;Take Caleb Olson. In October 2025, the NSRL Applied Performance Innovation teammates met with the Western States 100 winner for a mini camp in the desert of St. George, Utah, talking about his typical training and how he’s preparing for UTMB. That exchange cued unanswered questions in trail running, especially the power of downhill running. Olson asked how he could run downhills at full effort rather than conserving energy for the last descent. That question was an impetus for Nike Innovation Farm Team training: to build a training regime that could fortify Olson's body. Nike Innovation teammates created Nike products that would give him an edge — the same products tested at length by the Farm Team cohort.

“Lab data doesn’t win races,” says Kirby. “Conversations do. The data doesn’t mean anything if we can’t connect it to meaningful relationships with our athletes.”The Farm Team program wrapped in late July. Nike scientists now have their own mountain to climb in sorting through the data, and some intriguing results are bubbling up. One of them, says Kirby, is the improvement in physiological, biomechanical and psychological testing in the eccentric training group, which doesn’t resemble a traditional, blue-chip fitness program. On the mega ramp outside the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/lebron-james-innovation-center-nike-sport-research-lab" target="_blank">LeBron James Innovation Center</a>, while the runners completed punishing repeats, some of them assigned to the downhill regimen barely felt like they were breaking a sweat. This gives credibility to a convention-bucking point in the world of training: Eccentric tolerance is a training variable that must be worked into your plan.While the study’s conclusions are ongoing, the takeways are immediate. And that brings us back to Yao Miao, Camins d’Hèr and the wall.

The morning Miao began the race, she had a dedicated physiological cheat sheet at her fingertips, translated into pacing charts by the second over the technical course. It was like a menu at each stop describing which interventions to take, like whether to apply sunscreen, what fuel to eat and why, as well as researched recommendations for what product to wear. This data-backed advice came from Farm Team insights.Miao hit the cooling station at the eleventh stage. The Nike Innovation team had prescribed options: an ice bandana, cold water to pour over her head, salt tablets. They also created a cue card for her technique to help her efficiently scale the ascent: “Head down, shortest stride, poles fully engaged.” Included on that card was a concise summary of the plan to finish the race. It summed up in 27 words what Miao was feeling after more than 10 hours of peak physical exhaustion: “Final Wall. 57 minutes. Heart rate will be 96% the whole time, that IS the plan. You will feel awful, everyone does. From the top, only 8km remain.” Nobody knows exactly what will happen during the twists and turns of an ultra race. But thanks to residency programs like the Farm Team, there’s less mystery in knowing what makes an ultra runner tick.&nbsp;“The people who know athletes best are the ones who spend the most time with them — it’s that simple,” says Winn. “There’s no better way to do that than bringing them here to our house, inviting them in, and doing everything we can to support them.”

See how athlete insights from the new residency program help create better products for every ultra runner.

Innovation

Trail Running

How the Nike Innovation Farm Team Is Pushing the Science of Ultra Running

For the past six months, I’ve been reunited with a country that helped shape my understanding of Nike’s potential to change lives, build an industry, and grow through a deep connection to consumers and a passion for sport.I’ve traveled extensively across Greater China in that time and witnessed the resilience of Nike and Jordan and our strong connection to athletes* across the country. I’ve felt it from the unmatched energy of 25,000 fans at a Shanghai Port v. Yunnan Yukun CSL game at Pudong Football Stadium. From the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/lebron-china-tour-rise-eybl-scrimmage" target="_blank">next generation</a> competing in the China High School Basketball League; the Saturday morning pick-up basketball in Tianhe Sports Courts in Guangzhou; taking fencing lessons with Olympic champion <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/cheung-ka-long-wins-gold" target="_blank">Edgar Cheung Ka-long</a>; and the truly epic ACG ChongLi 168K Trail Run, where even the threat of a typhoon couldn’t stop our team or the 12,000 runners or the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/trail-runner-yao-miao-is-running-down-new-goals-with-acg" target="_blank">inspirational Yao Miao</a> running alongside young girls in the youth race.&nbsp;Sport is a fuel in our cities. It shapes culture and reminds Chinese athletes of all ages and abilities that potential is unlimited. Nike and Jordan are alive and well here. Our foundation is strong, and our connection to athletes is authentic and powerful.

I’ve also spent hundreds of hours on the commercial streets of our cities, visiting malls, observing consumers, studying livestreams, meeting with partners, and walking stores with our teammates. This is a fast-moving, deeply connected marketplace. I started my career on the sales floor of a Nike store and have since spent 25 years shaping Nike’s global marketplace and consumer experience, with an outsized share of time in Asia, so this opportunity is personal for me. I’ve seen the power of immersive retail experiences and connected digital to inspire consumers through access to the world’s greatest athletes and innovative product. I’ve witnessed that magical moment of lacing up a new pair of Nike running shoes for a new 5K goal.&nbsp;What all of this has reinforced is simple: Our connection with athletes remains strong, but the marketplace is not where it needs to be. Consumers expect authentic product, consistent storytelling and a seamless experience across every touchpoint. By creating a more consistent, premium and connected marketplace, we can reduce fragmentation, strengthen trust and deliver a better Nike and Jordan experience wherever consumers choose to engage.Rather than keeping pace — or leading, as our history would suggest — our presence has become too fragmented. As consumer behavior shifted rapidly during and after COVID, some of the steps we took created an experience that is less consistent, less trusted and not delivering the growth we expect.

So we are taking actions with a focused strategy to reimagine our marketplace end to end, starting with digital. Beginning in January 2027, Nike’s digital marketplace in China will be anchored by official Nike flagship experiences on Tmall, JD.com and Douyin, alongside Nike.com.cn and the Nike App. These new flagships will serve as the single elevated destination for Nike within these ecosystems, with clearer product presentation, stronger storytelling and more connected consumer journeys. This is about strengthening the platforms where consumers already begin and end their shopping journey, making sure those experiences are direct, consistent and unmistakably Nike.As part of this change, with some exceptions across licensee partners, partner-operated online storefronts will transition out of selling Nike product. This is not about reducing access. It is about reducing fragmentation and strengthening the consumer journey. When the experience is consistent, the brand becomes stronger.This is not just a digital strategy. Nike and Jordan stores remain central to how athletes experience our brands. Our retail partners play a critical role in bringing sport to life across communities, and we are committed to growing together.

In the past six months, we’ve opened new concepts such as ACG Basecamp and Rookie Kids stores and elevated our existing fleet, including our flagship House of Innovation in Shanghai, and we’ve seen strong consumer response through positive comps and returning traffic. We are also developing new locally led retail concepts that will come to market in the next six months. The work I’ve seen is authentic, is innovative and feels like the Nike we know and love.We will continue working closely with partners to elevate product presentation, improve service, sharpen assortments and create more meaningful sport-led experiences in stores. When we make these improvements, consumers respond, and we see clear opportunity to further strengthen the marketplace while creating value for our partners.

Our partner relationships are built on the shared understanding that short-term change is sometimes necessary to build a healthier marketplace for the long term. Yu Wu, Chairman, CEO &amp; Executive Director of Topsports International Holdings Ltd, whom I have come to know and deeply respect, recently described the opportunity this way to me:“As Nike’s largest distributor in the Chinese mainland, Topsports has worked with Nike for 27 years based on the principle of mutual benefit and shared growth. This adjustment will bring some short-term pressure to our business. But we firmly believe that, over the medium– to long-term, this direction will help promote a healthier, more orderly, and more sustainable retail ecosystem in China, while further improving consumer experience and product appeal.“Looking ahead, we will continue to work closely with Nike, leveraging our strengths in offline retail operations, local consumer service and deep market development across city tiers. Through new concept sport stores and high-quality physical retail experiences, we will bring Chinese consumers richer and more meaningful sport experiences.”I couldn’t agree more. This is about building a stronger, more sustainable marketplace — one that better serves consumers and supports long-term growth for both Nike and our partners.

We are also making broader changes to get closer to the consumer and support this transformation. We’ve named our first-ever Greater China Vice President of Local Product Creation, focused on building product designed, developed and made in China for Chinese consumers. That focus is essential to delivering the speed, relevance and precision this market demands.At the same time, we are strengthening our connection to communities, expanding local activations, investing in regional teams, and placing Nike teammates closer to where consumers live, shop and play sport. Because the strongest marketplace is one where product, storytelling, community, digital and retail work together seamlessly. It is where consumers can move from inspiration to purchase to participation without friction. And it is where every interaction reinforces what Nike stands for.

That is the strategy: a more premium digital marketplace, a stronger retail experience, more locally created product, and teams empowered closer to the consumer, all working together to deliver a consistent, elevated Nike experience.We are making these changes with clarity and conviction because we believe deeply in this market and its long-term potential. That belief is shaping the actions we are taking now. This work will take focus and discipline. But the direction is clear. The marketplace has changed. So, we will too.&nbsp;And we have the right team in place to keep up this momentum. Our teammates across Greater China inspire me every day. They know this market, understand our consumers and are already doing the work to elevate our brands. Personally, I’m energized and optimistic. Nike’s future in Greater China is bright. We remain deeply committed to building that future, one grounded in a stronger, more connected, elevated marketplace, both online and in-store, and focused on serving athletes across Greater China better than ever before.

*If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Cathy Sparks, Vice President & General Manager of Greater China, lays out a clear strategy for the future.

Feature

How We’re Reimagining the Marketplace in Greater China to Better Serve Athletes

It’s 2015, and touring Nike’s world campus in Beaverton, Oregon, is Kobe Bryant, 6 foot 6 inches of genius basketball talent, and energetically curious about what his partner sport brand is up to in its product innovation spaces. The creator of Mamba Mentality wanders up to Nike teammates at work and asks, “Are you creating that epic sh*t?”That phrase from Kobe has become <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-new-innovation-engine-announcement" target="_blank">the North Star</a> for Nike’s EVP and Chief Innovation, Design and Product Officer, Phil McCartney. It’s a call to action, and it spells out a mission as important to him as <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/bill-bowerman-nike-s-original-innovator" target="_blank">Bill Bowerman</a>’s mandate that the company should make athletes* better. “We’ve got the authenticity of Bowerman in the roots of the company, plus the athlete irreverence from Kobe, so put that together and it becomes a standard of excellence,” says McCartney. It’s the way he measures products: Is it epic? Does it make athletes better? “If it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t do it."

Before McCartney came into his role in June 2025, Nike had no shortage of ideas and sport-science research. What it needed was focus, the muscle memory to turn its athlete insights, science-backed data and design and product ideas into intentional, sharper, more epic swings. A little chutzpah couldn’t hurt either. “I wanted us to get our swagger back, to be more responsive, have a competitive spirit and an athlete’s mindset about the work,” says McCartney.A clear strategy, ruthless prioritization, and license to dream came through in short order. Last September, the Innovation team organized as “IDP” — Innovation, Design, Product — an acronym that McCartney says belies the creation process: Before his team does anything, they have to innovate,&nbsp;then&nbsp;design, and the product is the outcome. At the same time, the company launched its <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/amy-montagne-the-force-returning-nike-to-sport" target="_blank">Sport Offense</a> — organizing teams enterprise-wide by sport to better serve the athlete. His two immediate goals in his role: connect <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/meet-the-nike-mind-team" target="_blank">product back to science</a>, taking advantage of the company’s ability to scrutinize and study like no one else, and shore it up with the art of athleticism. And build a deeper, holistic approach to innovating that better connects teams across NIKE, Inc., creating one engine that accelerates product creation.

McCartney says he's at his happiest in creative spaces on campus — the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/inside-the-serena-williams-building" target="_blank">Serena Williams Building</a>, the Michael Jordan Building, the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/inside-the-nike-sports-research-lab-lebron-james-innovation-center" target="_blank">LeBron James Innovation Center</a> and Converse spaces, and the Bowerman Footwear Lab, where he says teams create magic every day. This 90,000-square-foot space tucked inside the campus’s Mia Hamm Building is an imagination machine for sneaker creation. Amidst heaps of colorful bolts of fabric and foot lasts, McCartney is like a kid at Disneyland, grinning at the technological abilities at the company’s fingertips. “This footwear lab changes how people think about creating product and designing —&nbsp;it’s our test kitchen,” explains McCartney, emphasizing that&nbsp;this&nbsp;is the space where you’re reminded that Nike is a product company serving athletes through new solutions. One of the most exciting parts of the space to McCartney is its real-time prototyping capabilities and the ability to tinker with a product idea for an athlete <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/how-nike-built-its-world-headquarters" target="_blank">visiting campus</a>, then instantly modify the proto based on their feedback.That innovator’s spirit goes hand and hand with another classic Nike strategy: Get out into the communities and know your people. “I want us to go grassroots again, to operate a hyperlocal model and be so connected with the athletes that we can anticipate their next need,” says McCartney. Sitting in his fifth-floor office in the Sebastian Coe Building, he pulls out his computer and flashes up a deck that goes deep on his innovation teams’ three major product focuses for Nike’s next fiscal year. You can see, he explains, how these three product constructs can be adapted by region, by sport and by athlete. The tight lineup didn’t start this way, he adds. Winnowing down the most innovative products to these three constructs took months of killing good ideas in favor of great ones, then punching those up to be epic.One step to making this a reality, says McCartney, is to bring key partners along. He’s fresh off a two-week trip to Asia, where he says he worked directly with factory owners he’s known for 20 years. “We walked through the steps to accelerate my teams’ ideas from concept to final product faster and more efficiently,” he says. “This is an essential part of revving our innovation engine and solving challenges in real time.”

Like everyone else he knew growing up, McCartney wanted to be footballer. The sport was the lifeblood of Newcastle, the city in northern England where he was raised. Football was also one of the clearest paths out of the working-class town, a place where most people left high school after 16 to start earning money. College was something that other people did, and opportunities elsewhere, like the U.S., seemed about as close as the moon. So, along with the rest of the boys he knew, McCartney joined his school football team, shoring up dreams of kicking his way into the Premier League.After his first few uninspiring games, his dad suggested he try something else. This was young Phil’s first lesson in editing and prioritizing, walking away from an okay idea for a better one. McCartney tried a running club, set up by local parents to keep their kids out of trouble. The families operated on a tight budget&nbsp;— his father installed drywall, and his mother worked in youth community building — and the rule within the club was that once you outgrew your trainers, you passed them down to a younger kid. McCartney was soon in possession of a pair of bright orange-red sneakers, replete with a yellow Swoosh as electric as lightening. “Imagine getting that as an 11-year-old kid,” he says. He loved them so much, he slept in them. “I had no idea what Nike was, didn’t know it was American, never even heard of Oregon.” But he knew how the shoes made him feel: invincible, strong, fast, capable.&nbsp;The first race he ever won — a 1,500-meter on the track — was in Nikes.He punctuates this story by pulling out a pair of those exact Nike Flame spikes on a January morning in Glo’s Cafe at the base of the LeBron James Innovation Building on Nike’s <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/how-nike-built-its-world-headquarters" target="_blank">Philip H. Knight Campus</a>. (These aren’t the same shoes he had as a youth, but rather a pair he tracked down later on.) They’re more than just leather and suede: The shoes are a reminder of his duality, who he is and who he’s been, and what has kept him going. The kid who filled his hours doodling sneakers; the teen who started working in retail to help support his family; the young man who applied for his dream job at Nike, becoming a Nike EKIN (because these experts are supposed to know the brand’s products backward and forward); and now, the leader who sets its strategy for innovation, design and product.McCartney knows persistence, intelligence and hard work brought him to where he is today, but for years, he says, he couldn’t help feelings of imposter syndrome, of thinking he was still that working-class kid from middle-of-nowhere-England pretending to be just as sophisticated as everyone else. To this day, he says, those feelings can creep in on him. “I’m proud of where I’m from, but there is just such a huge gap from where I was to where I am,” says McCartney. That fact makes it all the more important, he adds, to show his teams that they can be their authentic selves. “I want our people of all backgrounds to feel comfortable here,” he says, adding “it’s hard to be creative if you’re trying to be someone else at the same time.”McCartney credits some of this managerial approach to Vincent Coates, a Senior Director, Footwear Product Development Lead, for Global Football, who taught him that a great leader provides an environment for people to feel empowered. And Coates confirms that McCartney’s earned that: “I’d walk through a brick wall for Phil,” he says, calling him a leader who is as much at home leading an offsite to discuss footwear as he bringing the levity to diffuse the day-to-day pressure — like when he donned an Elvis outfit and sang Suspicious Minds to lighten the team mood (that story is fact-checked and confirmed). Coates says the company’s return to being a player in the global football market came from strategies like McCartney’s insistence on bringing siloed teams together. Before he took the role, Innovation sat separately from the Product and Marketing teams. Now they’re all connected and pulling toward the same focused goals. “Phil’s created a greater team and this culture of belonging, inclusivity and fun,” says Coates. “Yes, we have challenges. But now, because we’re figuring things out together, it’s an enjoyable journey. That’s the impact he has on people — he makes you want to be all in.”

Since childhood, sport has taken McCartney on some of the pivotal journeys of his life. Races gave him his first taste of exploring different parts of his home country and mixing with different people. With sport, “the world gets bigger and bigger,” he says. And because of his long-held dedication to running, he brings a particular empathy to his work and the plight of the athlete. He knows what it’s like to push yourself beyond what you think you could possibly do, to compete against yourself, to wake up at 5 am for a run, because that’s what he’s trained his mind and body to do. It’s a viewpoint he cherishes in his job, and one that athletes cherish within him. McCartney and legendary marathoner and <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/eliud-kipchoge-radical-airflow-new-york-city-marathon" target="_blank">Nike athlete Eliud Kipchoge</a> have been friends for more than a decade, and the record-breaking runner says that he and McCartney talk about everything: innovation, trail shoes, blisters, their families, the future of the company. Kipchoge loves that they can do that while on a run. “It feels great for me to talk to someone who was an athlete himself, who is working with Nike and&nbsp;is among the decision-makers,” says Kipchoge.Listening to athletes is not only one of the most inspiring and motivating parts of the job, McCartney says, but a key to making it all work. “The biggest thing in innovation is to take a chance with the athletes and whatever ideas they might have,” he says, citing <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/six-reasons-why-breaking2-goes-beyond-26-2-miles" target="_blank">Breaking2</a>, the 2017 project that ultimately helped Kipchoge <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/10-greatest-nike-air-sports-moments" target="_blank">complete a marathon in under two hours</a>. “It leads to huge advancements in sport, human potential and technology, and we need those moments just to think differently and bigger."

Like Nike athletes, McCartney wants his team to be bold in their approach to innovation and creativity. He knows, though, that it all starts with him as a leader: “I’m always balancing care with competitiveness,” he says. “We’ve got to win. So how do you create the conditions to do that?” His role isn’t just to execute or delegate; he also wants to create the right conditions for people to do their best work. “We don’t need people to be told what to do; we have loads of incredibly talented people,” he says. “What they need is direction, trust and the air cover to go after something big.”While McCartney may still be a bit incredulous about leaving Newcastle, when he visits home, he likes to talk to the local kids about his journey: that you can go from being a young runner propelled by the potential in your soles to the executive who guides their production. And not only the sport science that helped create them, but the look, the feeling and the heat&nbsp;that make a new generation of kids wear those shoes to bed at night.That’s the standard the company’s embracing again under McCartney’s guidance — in the lab, in athlete conversations, in the prototype, in the edit, in the final product. Nothing less than epic sh*t.

Chief Innovation, Design and Product Officer Phil McCartney knows what the bar is when it comes to innovation at the Swoosh. This is how he’s making sure the company’s products clear it.

From The Record

How the Nike Innovation Farm Team Is Pushing the Science of Ultra Running

How We’re Reimagining the Marketplace in Greater China to Better Serve Athletes

What Creating Epic Means Inside Nike Now