Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things

Chapter 10Nike—A Track Record of Success

Nike, named for the Greek goddess of victory, has consistently been the top-ranked global brand in apparel and sporting goods, and one of the top global brands, period.¹,² Its more than 50,000 employees generate close to $30 billion in annual revenue. Its stock price has resembled its own iconic swoosh in terms of consistent, exponential growth, with its market capitalization increasing threefold to approximately $80 billion in the past decade.

Nike's growth is due in no small part to innovation. The textured rubber sole that now exists in one form or another on a variety of athletic shoes was originally prototyped in the early 1970s by Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, by pouring rubber into a waffle iron.³ Numerous product introductions and thousands of patents later, Fast Company named Nike the Most Innovative Company of 2013—ahead of Amazon, Google, and Apple—for its Flyknit athletic shoe and FuelBand wearable.⁴

The Flyknit radically reimagines shoe design and manufacturing, replacing labor-intensive cutting and stitching with computer-controlled knitting, thus dramatically reducing waste in the manufacturing process while enhancing product customizability. The Nike+ FuelBand was one of the first “wearable” wristband activity trackers. If that were all it was, we might consider the FuelBand to be an example of product leadership. But from the time of its launch, it was engineered to link to back-end services, and it and other members ...