The LeBron James Innovation Center

What It Does

The NSRL is built with nearly every training environment imaginable for Nike researchers to study sport performance. Its facilities include a state-of-the-art basketball court, a 200-meter endurance track, a 100-meter straightaway and an artificial-turf training pitch. All in service of capturing athletes in motion at full speed, the NSRL houses the world’s largest motion-capture installation. Nearly 100 force plates help scientists study an athlete's interaction with their field of play, while four advanced climate chambers simulate the thermal environments experienced by athletes at temperatures from -20 degrees C to 50 degrees celsius. 

“This is the epicenter of where we work with athletes of all abilities, all backgrounds, all skills and all sports,” says Matthew Nurse, PhD, VP, Chief Science Officer at Nike.

The NSRL has many goals. Here, Nike can understand the unique needs of athletes, contextualize challenges, and advance breakthroughs across a spectrum of athletic, no matter the playing field.

What It Helps Us Do

While athletes within the NSRL are being observed at play, other people are at play, too: testing, prototyping and innovating inside the LeBron James Innovation Center to help shape the future of sport. The community of Nike experts who work in the building are diversely talented, from biomechanics researchers to robotics experts, from computational designers to patent pros, all working together to uncover new frontiers in sport performance. Teammates work across disciplines, forming an expertise greater than the sum of individual talents.

“In the Innovation space, we take information from the NSRL, and we’re able to look at different ways to solve an athlete’s problem. It gets extremely interesting,” says Janett Nichol, VP of Apparel and Advanced Digital Creation Studio. “In a conventional way of building a product, we would just go straight to a material, get a pattern, sew it, and then that would be it. Here, we can go to anything from biology to chemistry to pushing the limits of a machine to create a very different experience with materials.”

Practically no corner of Nike is untouched by the creativity that’s stoked in the LeBron James Innovation Center. And no design feature was an afterthought. Keeping sustainability at the forefront, the building features 908 solar panels on its roof, is powered by 100% renewable electricity, and uses over 21,000 lbs of Nike Grind for the NSRL flooring. Other details are subtle callouts to Nike history. The entryway to the LeBron James Innovation Center mimics the dimensions of a shoebox. A replica Winnebago, housed inside the building as a meeting space, nods to Nike's early days of selling shoes.

At over 750,000 square feet, the building is a beacon for athletic performance, just like the athlete for whom it’s named. The mission of the researchers, scientists, designers, engineers, makers and artisans who work here is to make athletes better and make the world better for athletes.