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Insights for product managers from BMW’s open innovation strategy

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TLDR

In this episode, I’m interviewing Brooke Rennison, Emerging Technology Manager at BMW, about building and scaling an internal innovation system at BMW’s IT Tech Office in the Americas. Brooke shares how her team empowers 40,000 employees to participate in innovation using structured processes, training, and partnerships with universities, startups, and big tech. She also covers lessons learned, the importance of feedback, managing the innovation funnel, and how a small team can drive large-scale change across a global organization.

Introduction

Open innovation has become very popular as a way for organizations to bring in external capabilities — partner with startups, tap universities, bring in the best outside technology. But, actual outcomes have been hit and miss, producing helpful results for some companies and being a distraction for others. The hard part isn’t meeting interesting startups — it’s having a repeatable way to find the right ones, evaluate their technology honestly, and actually turn it into something the business ships.

My guest has successfully done exactly that at the BMW Group. Brooke Rennison is an Emerging Technology Manager at BMW, leading innovation strategy within the IT Tech Office. She’s been with BMW since 2011, came up through data and analytics, and today she builds the roadmap that moves emerging-technology ideas from concept into reality — always with an eye on real business value. If you’ve ever wondered how a complex company absorbs an outside idea and makes it real, that’s what we’re getting into.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

Establishing an Innovation Mission and System at BMW:
Brooke details how the BMW IT Tech Office set out to foster a culture of innovation by clearly defining its vision: to build innovative leaders, embrace both breakthrough and incremental change, and stay ahead of market trends. By creating structured innovation programs, including open innovation platforms, university partnerships, and startup engagements, the team ensures new ideas can flow from conception to implementation.

BMW’s Open Innovation Ideation Process:
BMW’s version of “open innovation” means giving all 40,000 BMW employees worldwide the opportunity to submit, discuss, and develop ideas. The innovation strategy team focuses on bringing in novel technologies and ideas that are not currently available at BMW. Using a digital crowd innovation platform, employees can propose solutions to specific challenges. The process is reinforced by structured feedback and a commitment to ensuring ideas receive real consideration, motivating repeated participation from innovators across the business.

Pre-Screening:
Promising ideas enter BMW’s internal incubator, where they are assessed and developed using a stage-gate process with Technical Readiness Levels (TRLs), a model borrowed from NASA. The ideas enter a pre-screening phase, where the team does research to see which external partners could help develop the idea.

Leadership Buy-In:
The next step is gateway check 1, where IT and business VPs and other leaders approve the project and provide resources. This step ensures strong top-down leadership buy-in and project accountability.

Validation:
The team continues to develop the project using the the design thinking tactics of desirability, viability, and feasibility. They also start basic prototyping. After 12 weeks, the project goes through another gateway check.

Pilot:
After a final pilot phase, the IT team transfers the product to the appropriate product team.

Design Thinking and Organizational Training:
To develop internal innovation leaders, Brooke’s team runs design workshops and offers web-based training for BMW employees. These training sessions teach design thinking methods, entrepreneurship skills, and help employees explore their ideas in greater depth, fostering creativity and a shared language around innovation and digitalization.

Leveraging External Partnerships:
The BMW innovation system collaborates with universities, startups (via the BMW Startup Garage), and big tech companies. These partnerships are strategically matched to BMW’s needs, allowing the company to access new technology, capabilities, and perspectives while maintaining internal core competencies.

Useful Links

• Learn more about BMW Open Innovation
• Register for the PMDA Ignite Innovation Summit where Brooke is leading a session “Caught Between a Moonshot and a Hard Place.” Listeners get 20% off with code PDMACHAD20. Teams of 3 or more also get a discount when registering.
• Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“It’s okay to be stuck, but it’s not okay to stay stuck.” – Brooke Rennison

Application Questions

1. How does your organization currently capture and implement employee-generated ideas, and what platforms or processes could improve that engagement?
2. What role do feedback and transparency play in maintaining enthusiasm for innovation among employees whose ideas aren’t selected?
3. How can a small innovation team effectively scale its influence and impact across a large, complex organization?
4. In what ways can partnerships with universities, startups, or big tech accelerate innovation within your business and how would you determine the right partners?
5. What metrics or stage-gate checkpoints could you introduce to ensure new ideas are developed, vetted, and advanced with both rigor and flexibility?

Bio

Brooke Rennison leads Open Innovation within the BMW IT Tech Office, with a focus on designing and operationalizing enterprise scale innovation processes. Brooke’s work centers on building repeatable systems that connect external ecosystems with internal R&D and business execution. With experience spanning technology scouting, ecosystem partnerships, and innovation enablement, Brooke specializes in turning Open Innovation from an aspiration into a measurable, process driven capability. Brooke also leads the Innovation Center of Excellence (CoE), enabling distributed innovation execution across business units through shared processes and governance.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.