One of the greatest challenges for corporate innovators is making successful handoffs to the business. Transitioning innovations to market — without them getting lost, mangled, or killed — is fraught with complexity and risk. For this 2025 InnoLead members’ meeting, Jordan Rice, COO of Nike Innovation, led a conversation about innovation transitions, success criteria, and KPIs. A hardware and systems engineer by training, Jordan says most systems break at the interface, whether it’s steel that fractures at the welding, or applications that break at the APIs. Similarly, says Jordan, innovation handoffs break at humans connections and personal relationships, so innovators need to “sweat the interface.”
Here are notes from the discussion:
Nike Innovation is a ~550–600 person organization responsible for moving ideas from “a very early fragile state” into Nike’s inline businesses and ultimately to consumers. It is not a detached skunkworks. Instead, it provides the enabling backbone — portfolio management, prioritization, partnerships, supply chain, program management, and storytelling — that allows innovation to survive scale.
Physically and symbolically, it sits at the center of Nike’s headquarters. Rice says, “We sit in the LeBron James Innovation Center… one building next to the building where all the C-suite sits… and then one building on the other side… is where all the product creation and design teams live.”
Organizationally, Nike Innovation is part of the IDP (Innovation, Design, Product) group at the company. One recent project that Rice mentioned was Project Amplify, a powered wearable “exoskeleton” device to help runners and walkers go further and faster.
9 Insights About How Nike Structures Innovation
1. Treat handoffs as ownership changes, not project deliveries
For Rice, a handoff is not the end of the road — it’s a transfer of accountability. “The transition is… flipping the ownership of the concept… over to your inline partners.”
Implication: Design innovation processes around who owns decisions post-handoff, not who built the prototype.
2. “Sweat the interface” — failure happens between teams
This idea traces back to Rice’s Bell Labs experience as a systems engineer. “Things tend to fail at the interfaces, between people, between systems and engineering… where things are connected, where two APIs talk to each other.”
Implication: Innovation leaders should manage trust, communication, and incentives at key junctures in the process.
3. Build trust long before you make the handoff
Rice sees failed handoffs as a timing failure, as much as a technical one. “We often talk about the time to engage with our partners downstream is often much, much earlier than you’d think,” he says. And it’s important to be sensitive to when inline groups have big deadlines of their own.
Implication: Successful transitions start months — or years — before a formal handoff.
4. Share roadmaps years ahead to reduce fear and resistance
Nike Innovation shares roadmaps three years out with the business, “so they have some understanding of when they’re going to be asked to take ownership of an idea, and the scope and scale of that idea, and what the complexity is associated with that.”
Implication: Predictability matters a lot in large organizations.
5. Transfer the “why,” not just the artifact
Rice repeatedly warns against treating innovation as a physical or digital object: “Have you transitioned the story, the why… or did you just transition the CAD and prototype?”
Implication: Narrative, intent, and consumer insight are core handoff assets.
6. Preserve early consumer insight across the lifecycle
Nike captures ethnographic research, testing feedback, and interviews early and carries them forward digitally. If you don’t, Rice cautions, “It’s like one big long game of telephone… and it can get very, very garbled by the time it makes it out into the wild.”
Implication: Innovation encounters headwinds when downstream teams lose sight of original intent.
7. Use data and judgment to decide when something is de-risked
Nike balances hard metrics (testing, supply chain readiness) with design and brand judgment. “One half is very design/emotional… the other half is very analytical,” Rice says. “Has it gone enough miles? Has it gone through enough cycles? Do we feel good about the failure rate? Can we project out what that failure rate will be?
Implication: Data-oriented KPIs can be blended with storytelling and emotional judgments to determine when a project is ready to move forward.
8. Incentives quietly sabotage innovation if left untouched
Rice is blunt about this: “Interfaces often fail because incentives aren’t aligned.” Nike’s historic KPI—percent of revenue—pushed innovation toward large categories, and away from parts of the business that might have the need for new ideas, but were smaller in scale. “…We want to take some of the innovations that…would be better-served going into a smaller business, so that we can really stick the landing…. and then move it into one of those bigger ones, where it has that white hot spotlight. Sometimes, that’s actually a great way to scale something, because the barrier to entry to one of those big $10 billion businesses can be so high, and it takes so much effort to get one little thing over that hurdle from a transition perspective.”
Rice says he is actively working to evolve Nike’s incentive model toward a three-part balance:
- Revenue
- Percent of line (how broadly innovation reaches consumers)
- Consumer sentiment / mindshare
“I’d love to see a balance of those three,” he says.
Implication: Misaligned incentives can create perfectly rational resistance to innovation.
9. Create separate businesses only when the core org can’t deliver
Nike has spun out efforts like FuelBand and Amplify as their own businesses — but selectively. “Sometimes you make the decision that… we don’t have the current org structure to deliver on this thing,” Rice says. “I think Microsoft had the org structure deliver on Xbox, but realized that that was going to be…killed a million times internally if it didn’t exist on its own.”
Implication: Structural separation should be a last resort, not a default strategy.
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