At the end of September, adidas opened the doors to Home of Innovation at its headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany. We were shown what the brand is working on before some of it becomes an actual product — and, in some cases, while it is still so experimental that no one knows whether it ever will.

Home of Innovation is what adidas calls its “living laboratory”: a way of showing the process behind innovation, from a problem an athlete brings to the team to an idea, a prototype, endless testing and, eventually, a product. Everything we saw was organised around three areas: Future of Fast, Future of Cool and Future of Strength.

But before we got to the shoes, foam and laboratories, Alasdhair Willis, Chief Creative Officer at adidas, explained why the company had changed the way it approaches innovation in the first place.

The starting point, he said, goes all the way back to Adi Dassler and one principle: “only the best for the athlete.” When Willis took over the leadership of innovation around three and a half years ago, the team kept that foundation but added three things.

First, think bigger: work across more sports and with more athletes. Second, be faster: shorten the journey from athlete insight to prototyping, validation and, eventually, a scalable product. And third, get even closer to the athletes, involving them from the very beginning of the process rather than just bringing them in to test something at the end.

Together, it became: “Only the best for the athlete, at speed.”

Now, let me take you inside and show you what adidas showed us.

Normally, the stiffness of a carbon-plated shoe is fixed. The Adizero Gearshift is built around the idea that it doesn’t have to be.

adidas showed us two versions. The mechanical one has a small slider on the side of the shoe that changes the stiffness of the plate, switching between a softer “cruise” mode and a stiffer “attack” mode. The electronic version can connect to a watch and adjust the plate digitally. Both are still concepts currently being tested with adidas athletes.

What I liked was that the mechanism wasn’t hidden. Quite the opposite: visually, your eye goes straight to it.

And that led us to a bigger conversation about something that sounds obvious but isn’t: when you are designing for performance, what comes first — the body or the beauty of the object?

For Galway, adidas is trying not to separate the two anymore.

Making an extraordinary product for one extraordinary athlete is not the end of the process. The idea is to learn from what works at the very top of sport and then work out how those benefits can move into products for everyone else.

His example was the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, the shoe worn by Sebastian Sawe when he broke the two-hour marathon barrier in London.

For Willis, that is one of the real tests of innovation:

Then they took us into APEX — the Athlete Product Excellence Lab, a place where adidas works directly with athletes: studying how they move, identifying very specific problems and testing what changes when you adjust a shoe, a material or a piece of apparel.

I assumed the process would begin with somebody being covered in sensors. Apparently, it usually begins by talking.

Margherita Raccuglia, Director of Athlete Performance at adidas Innovation, explained:

She gave me an example I loved. In trail running, the team had naturally spent a lot of time looking at what happens when athletes run uphill. That is where you assume the problem is: it is exhausting.

Then an athlete told them: I struggle when I go downhill. Suddenly, they had a completely new thing to investigate.

Is it a footwear problem? An apparel problem? Biomechanics? Physiology? Temperature? Movement? From there, the team creates a hypothesis, makes a very basic first prototype — what Raccuglia calls a “demonstrator” — and starts testing.

One of the things adidas showed us at Home of Innovation was its work with 3D-printed foam midsoles.

This is different from the 3D-printed resin structures the brand has already used in footwear. Foam is normally produced using moulds, which means there are limits to how much you can change its structure. Here, adidas is exploring what happens when the foam itself can be printed in different geometries.

The interesting part is what that could eventually allow them to do: change how different parts of the midsole compress, move and support the foot, and potentially tune those properties much more precisely for different athletes.

Probably one of the most unexpectedly satisfying ideas adidas showed us. This version of the Climacool Slide is made using Rapid Liquid Printing. Each pair takes around seven hours to print, followed by another five hours curing in a gel bath.

The cooling system is built directly into the shoe. There are 11 smaller chambers under the foot and four larger ones wrapping around the upper, all intended to help cool the athlete before or after exertion. At the moment, that effect lasts for roughly 30 minutes.

Then there is the much more serious-looking CLIMACOOL cooling vest.

The vest contains a specialised gel that is frozen before use and cools the upper body as it slowly thaws. On top goes an insulating jacket designed to trap the cold air and prolong the effect. Used together they can lower skin temperature by up to 13°C and core body temperature by up to 0.5°C.

The technology was originally developed for motorsport, where drivers have to deal with extreme heat inside the cockpit, and was later adapted for other sports, including football.

Margherita Raccuglia told me adidas has been studying temperature management for years.

And it isn’t just runners. She said the team has worked with F1 drivers, F1 Academy, F2, tennis players and footballers. Sascha Zverev, for example, contributed feedback on how he wanted to use cooling during breaks in a tennis match.

HYPERBOOST 360 might have been the product I most wanted to immediately put on my feet.

It is an experimental recovery clog built around HyperBOOST PRO foam — except instead of putting foam only underneath the foot, adidas basically wraps the foot in it.

The shoe is laceless, soft, and deliberately oversized-looking, with a huge cutout around the heel designed to take pressure away from the Achilles.

After seeing shoes with moving carbon plates and midsoles being 3D-printed, I liked how uncomplicated the question behind HYPERBOOST 360 felt: What should you put on your feet when you have finished asking everything from them?

It also showed that adidas is looking at the athlete’s journey beyond the actual moment of competition. Performance is one problem, and, you know, recovery is another.

Home of Innovation isn’t really about adidas presenting a finished version of the future. Most of what I saw was interesting precisely because it wasn’t finished.

Can a shoe change stiffness halfway through a run? Can foam be engineered around one particular athlete? Can cooling someone’s feet for a few minutes make a meaningful difference? Can something created for an elite athlete eventually make my completely non-elite run a little easier?

Some of these prototypes will probably turn into actual products, and some might disappear along the way. Hopefully, more of them end up in the first category.