STATE OF THE ART? Well, ummm…

Nike is getting a lot of media coverage for its recent “A.I.” shoe concepts. The designs are slick, for sure, but the whole thing is more a lesson about marketing a company’s innovation efforts than the actual tech.

A.I image generation? Parametric modeling? 3D printing? Big deal.

Maybe my family is strange, but my kids already use these — in high school. Using Midjourney to fluff up your moodboards? OK, that’s only a year old, but the other technologies are decades old.

Innovation is a derisking process. Understanding that innovation IS A PROCESS is a key indicator of the maturity of a management team. A process that can be managed and optimized just like any other business process, one that can be leveraged for rapid brand-building activities, one that can dramatically reduce market-misses for unloved new products, one that can mobilize scarce corporate resources.

I believe strongly in time-based competition as the only relevant factor in innovation programs. So many leaders that I’ve worked with grossly underestimate the window of time for new ideas to remain competitive. Time waits for no one, especially corporate incompetence.

What is really great is hearing John Hoke, Nike’s Chief Innovation Officer, describe the process in detail.

What Hoke is really showing is how fast the early stages of innovation programs can be run using standard modern design processes. And that rapidly visualizing and building tangible demonstrations are timeless methods to catalyze radical ideas.

The challenge for companies like Nike is now moving those sexy showcar concepts through the brutal reality of corporate matrixed/siloed/multinational politics, supply chain hell, channel partner hell, and answering to their impatient customer base why it took them 3 years to launch these sexy concepts as real products — if these ever become real products at all.