The Studio Movement

Last week Nike CEO John Donahoe was asked why the company had fallen off the pace over the past few years.

His answer was simple.

In his eyes, the company had lost its ability to undertake the bold, disruptive innovation that it had once been famous for.

The culprit? Zoom.

For Donahoe, two and a half years as a fully-remote company had dulled its creative edge.

And though Nike had managed to grow as a company since 2020, it had done so solely by relying on “iterative innovation” instead: incremental improvements to products in markets where Nike was already number one.

I don’t agree with Donahoe in pinning Nike’s loss of innovation on remote work: companies like Nvidia seem to be doing just fine when it comes to blending flexibility and creativity.

Presented without comment.

But I think his distinction - between iterative innovation, and disruptive innovation - is a good one.

As is his point that companies need to put the work in if their teams are to do their most creative, most strategic work.

Donahoe’s frustration, I think, comes from something we at Ashore call the missing middle.

There are great spaces for day to day work (offices, shared offices, home-offices, co-working spaces).

And there are great places for large, set-piece moments, where a company needs to get everybody together behind a shared direction.

But when it comes to making the major decisions, solving the biggest challenges, or coming up with the most radical ideas - the disruptive innovation Donahoe talks about - those spaces didn’t exist at Nike.

That’s not to mean those spaces don’t exist full stop.

Artists, musicians, and writers gather in these spaces all the time.

It’s the insight at the heart of the concept of the studio.

Whether it’s Abbey Road or Air Studios: these are spaces that exist for people to get together, hone their craft, and focus on doing great work.

Cups of tea mandatory.

But that doesn’t mean that these kinds of spaces are the preserve of creatives only. You just need to make - or most likely, find - them yourself.

This is where I come back to Nike.

If - as a follow up question - Sarah Eisen of CNBC had asked Donahoe, what in particular had been done to bring back some of the disruptive innovation over the past few years, I don’t think he would have pointed to the fact they went from three days in the office to four days in the office.

I think instead he would have gone straight to talking about the LeBron James Innovation centre - the new home of the Nike Sport Research Lab, opened in 2021.

Facilities include a full-size basketball court with camera tracking, fast-prototyping machines, and a robot that can run 300 miles inside 48 hours, non stop.

It’s not only the world’s largest motion-capture installation.

It’s Nike’s attempt at what a studio, but for making stuff for athletes, would look like.

Big Ashore Energy.

The kit is - as you’d expect - best in class.

But when you listen to the testimonials on the Nike Sport Research Lab’s website you realise it’s not just about the equipment.

It’s about having the space to get people together, and let them step back and think..

It was the same with the recording studios I mentioned above.

Originally, studios like Abbey Road were set up by the companies like the Gramophone corporation due to the difficulties of moving recording equipment.

But soon after, musicians realised that the fact the space itself existed, and that they could go there together, was what really mattered.

As Phil Ramone said about the warren of recording booths at Capitol Records’ HQ: “People play better at Capitol Towers.”

So whilst it might, instinctively, seem impossible to compete with Nike, you probably don’t need the tech the LeBron James centre has.

For most companies you just need the people. And a space to get them together, focus on a challenge, and solve that challenge.

Because at heart, that’s all the disruptive innovation Donahoe talks about is: a bunch of people working through an idea, and another, and another.

Taking each one, and forcing it through Steve Jobs’ rock tumbler.

To borrow from Colonel Boyd: “people, ideas, machines - in that order”

Whether it’s Electric Lady Studios, or the Nike campus, or in an Ashore, there’s not much more to it than that.

A studio for music, a studio for sports, and a studio for whatever our users are working on.

So I think - in the quest for disruptive innovation - we’ll see more companies go where Nike treads.

Finding - and even building - their own studios for x.

It’s time for the studio movement.

aled@ashore.io