Nike’s Stefan Olander On Following The Wisdom Of Tweens

Goal: Create a device that keeps everyone, not just runners, motivated and active.

STEP 1: OBSERVE

"My 12-year-old son is into tae kwon do. I saw this incredible pride when he got a new color belt--‘Dad, I made it to blue!' That just struck me. We’re propelled by recognition.”

STEP 2: TRACK

"We took that angle of color with the Nike+ FuelBand. You wear it all day: The LED display starts off red, then goes to yellow as you move through your day, and turns green when you hit your goal.”

STEP 3: COMPETE

"But people also want to measure activity against their friends’, and there was no way to do that if you played different sports. That led to the development of a new metric called NikeFuel.”

STEP 4: COMPUTE

"We spent a ton of time working with researchers at Arizona State University, measuring the motion of your wrist in a particular activity and then correlating it to oxygen intake and consumption for that activity. Then we developed algorithms to assign NikeFuel based on each activity.”

STEP 5: COMPARE

"We launched this on January 19 in New York--and at the time, you didn’t have a reference point: How much is 2,000 NikeFuel? Through Facebook Connect and our app, users can quickly correlate their scores with other people’s.”

STEP 6: CELEBRATE

"It’s still all about wanting credit for something we’ve done--whether that’s someone tapping you on the shoulder to say, ‘Good job,' or, in our case, using technology to do that for you.”

Illustrations by Peter Sucheski

A version of this article appears in the June 2012 issue of Fast Company.