Nike tells us that corporate responsibility must evolve:

We know a better shoe sacrifices nothing, except what didn’t belong there to begin with. The same can be said for corporate responsibility. It shouldn’t be about business tradeoffs, managing problems and mitigating risks. It should be about harnessing innovation to create something new and better”

For me this gets to the heart of the opportunity: to create new and better market-based solutions. Given that Nike, arguably, hasn’t been serious about corporate responsibility for all that long, their recent journey in defining and framing the agenda is hugely impressive.

Nike was the poster-child for unethical corporate practice throughout the 1990s for maintaining poor working conditions in their factories, and being defensive about it (”Its not our fault!”). Do you remember in 2002 that Nike announced it was going to stop publishing a Corporate Social Responsibility Report? They were being tried in court for exaggerating the improvements they’d made to working conditions, and consequently decided to hide from the public eye for a while.

But then, in 2005, they did publish a report, and also made a very public and humble apology for past misjudgements. Phil Knight, founder and then CEO, went so far as to take personal responsibility for the way Nike operated its supply chain. They opened up their books, setting a new standard in transparency, candidly discussing problems they faced, and publishing an address list of all 700 manufacturers and suppliers around the world. That felt like a big gesture, leaving us wondering what was next.

Now I’m reading their recently released 2006 report, a 163 page analysis of where they’re at, starting with the following statement from Mark Parker, Nike’s current CEO: “We have made tremendous progress over the last two years in more deeply integrating corporate responsibility into our business model. We see corporate responsibility as a catalyst for growth and innovation, an integral part of how we can use the power of our brand, the energy and passion of our people, and the scale of our business to create meaningful change.”

Check here to see their ambitious but well-aligned 2011 targets to: improve labor conditions in contract factories; become a climate neutral company; drive sustainable product design and innovation; and give excluded youth greater access to the benefits of sport. To achieve this is going to take the whole company to do things differently. But they’re also super clear about what’s in their control and what requires the wider ecosystem to evolve.