Nike's labor practices were the subject of high profile public protests in the 1990s, and CEO Mark Parker said the company still had a lot of work to do in that area. The case also details how making sustainability a key part of the design process led Nike to develop more innovative and high-performing products, such as a breakthrough running shoe called the Flyknit, which was widely worn at the 2012 Olympics. Following protests in the late 1990s over unsafe working conditions, low wage rates, excessive overtime, restrictions on employee organizing, and negative environmental impacts, Nike began shifting from a reactive to a proactive mode. During the 15 years covered in this case, Nike made significant changes in its sustainability practices, including moving its Corporate Responsibility team much further upstream in the organization, where it could have a greater impact on decisions by providing input early in the process. The company also developed multiple indexes that measured its sustainability practices and those of its independent contract manufacturers. The indexes had metrics for measuring the relevant impacts of product waste, water, chemistry, labor, and energy. Nike's critics said many labor issues had not been resolved, but Nike made progress in that area through collaboration with governments, NGOs and labor unions, and through management compliance trainings. If a contract factory did not score high enough on the company's sustainability and labor ratings scales, Nike would impose sanctions on the factory or even drop it from the supply chain. These actions took Nike off the top of most activists' target lists.

Mukesh Ambani, the CEO of India's largest business house, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), was contemplating a major decision that could significantly affect the future of his company as well as the telecommunications landscape in India. By 2002, GSM (Global System for Mobile) cellular roaming services, based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technology, had become the de facto standard in India. Seeking to find an alternative to GSM, Ambani's telecom team had developed an innovative solution for providing inexpensive roaming cellular services to customers on a nationwide basis using CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology. The required infrastructure for CDMA, which was significantly less costly than that of GSM, was already in place. As an early mover with a competitively priced CDMA offering, Ambani was confident he could capture a large percentage of the market. Reliance had permission from the Indian government to provide local CDMA coverage, yet there was nothing in the law that explicitly prohibited the company from rolling out these services on a more widespread basis to subscribers across the country.