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Stanford Business magazine

 

Spreadsheet

Supply Chain Races for Green Footwear

As Nike came under scrutiny for the labor practices in its contract factories in the late 1990s, the company went on the defensive. At first, its efforts were spurred by bad publicity, said Hannah Jones, Nike’s vice president of corporate responsibility, speaking at the Socially and Environmentally Responsible Supply Chains conference, a gathering sponsored by the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum and the Center for Social Innovation that drew hundreds of attendees to Stanford in April.

But today, Jones said, Nike is beginning to look at corporate social responsibility as another engine of innovation for the company. “We’re looking at business models as a force for massive social change.”

The case for doing so is a strong one, given that threats to water and oil and environmentally related developments such as epidemics ultimately could close down Nike’s supply chain and affect its customer base. Jones cited one of Nike’s footwear technologies as a model. Nike Air heel pockets initially contained SF6, a noxious greenhouse gas; the technology was reconfigured with a revolutionary new design that was SF6-free and could cradle the entire sole.

Score one for Nike; score one for the planet.