Inside the Nike Sport Research Lab — Innovation as a Cultural Identity

The first Maxim is "It is our nature to innovate," and Nike puts a 85,000-square-foot building behind it. The Nike Sport Research Lab — renamed the LeBron James Innovation Center in 2020 — is where every Air technology, Vaporfly carbon plate, and new running geometry gets tested on real athletes. Candidates who can talk fluently about how Nike actually invents things tend to outperform candidates who only quote slogans.