The innovator
A portrait by cineastas
My name is Mike Friton. I'm an innovator shoemaker, paper sculptor, weaver,
and I blend all these crafts together.
I spent 30 years as a shoe builder for Nike.
In high school I started running track and that led me to a University of Oregon, to be on the track team.
In Eugene, everybody looked up to running because it was very popular and pretty, pretty was alive at the time.
It was really fun time to be there, a lot of energy and excitement around it .
I ran the steeplechase, which was an event where you jump over five hurdles and a water jump.
Your shoes would fill up with water and be well over extra pound.
The first modifications I made were putting holes in my shoe
in a way that would damage the structure or integrity of the shoe.
And there's a little bit of trial and error in doing that, I mean, some of my shoes failed,
but I eventually figured it out.
Innovator was put upon me, I guess, when I was at Nike.
We created a new group called the Innovation Kitchen.
And it sort of came about as a brainstorm among the group, there were about twenty of us
that started that side exploration group at Nike.
And that just naturally came up, you know, innovator rather than designer or engineer
We were all exploring things outside of what a normal designer would do or just an engineer would do.
We're combining and mixing things, so innovator seemed to be a netter fit.
A lot of what I do is about finding the path or new concepts and ideas.
I'm always curious and exploring all the different fringes of everything related to the subject that I'm working on
And from that you develop a bigger palette of things you can pick and choose from.
I look to weaving to learn about textiles,
so that I can figure out how I can manipulate the textiles to solve the problem,
or paper folding so I can learn how I can create 3D form from flat goods,
through more of a structural manipulation of things.
I think I would describe it as just mixing the pot,
you're just taking really different elements,
and just stirring it up and finding interesting things that come out of it.
You're stretching your imagination, and you're able to hold on all these things
that are usually not directly related to shoes and that's to me is when you become innovators.
When you realize that there's more out there than just the small old niche that you're in.
I think it's a natural process, that's within us all,
something about curiosity that drives us towards it.
I think it's very important to our survival, our basic survival.
You know, without innovation, I think we'd all become extinct.
The innovator