An ongoing inspiration franchise designed to keep Nike's strategic and creative leadership connected to the ideas shaping culture, business, and technology — from the inside out.
"Keeping the world's most inspired brand inspired."
The Foundry was a recurring series of curated sessions for Nike's teams in Portland, Oregon. Each session brought together external speakers, emerging research, and hands-on workshop design to explore a theme with genuine strategic relevance — from the Sharing Economy and Retail 2.0 to Thinking Editorially and beyond.
The work went beyond curation. Each session was designed to build lateral thinking capabilities across teams, establish new cross-functional relationships, and introduce perspectives from entirely outside the industry. Learnings were then structured into actionable insights and disseminated through a custom-built app that gave the whole organisation access to what had been discovered.
The Foundry became a trusted internal resource — a standing proof that the best ideas for Nike often came from far outside Nike.
Impact