As a young expat in Brazil, I often found myself stuck in frustrating traffic jams. It was during those moments that I decided to dedicate my professional life to making mobility more enjoyable, efficient, and sustainable.
Over the years, I've been fortunate to nurture this passion through leadership roles in Business Development, Product Management, Corporate Strategy, and Venture Building at some of the most renowned mobility companies across the globe.
Today, I have the privilege of serving as the head of Open Innovation at the BMW Group. My team's mission is to search for emerging technologies and societal trends in the world of mobility, and then transform these insights into real value for our customers and our business. We're enthusiastic proponents of innovative approaches like 'Crowd Innovation,' 'Intrapreneurship Accelerator,' and 'Business Building.'
With a background in Economics and Social Sciences, earned through my PhD at JKU Linz, and my experience as a lecturer in Corporate Entrepreneurship at LMU Munich, I strive to blend state-of-the-art academic techniques with entrepreneurial, lean startup practices. This approach has led my team to identify more than 1000 relevant business ideas in transportation and successfully establish over 140 internal BMW startups in the past five years.
In today’s ever-evolving landscape of corporate innovation, the ability to ask the right questions is a fundamental skill for identifying customer problems, uncovering opportunities, and forging new business pathways. Manuel Schneider will provide practical insights into the art of questioning and strategies to eliminate biases that can obscure the customer perspective. He will share insights on:
- The Power of effective questioning – the approach to leveraging thoughtfully constructed queries as catalysts for innovative ideas and solutions
- Customer insights unveiled: using the right questions for customer validation, exploring techniques for empathizing with customers and extracting valuable insights to drive problem-solving and identify opportunities – with examples of good and bad questions
- Guarding against cognitive biases – leveraging effective techniques to avoid subtle biases that can inadvertently creep into the customer interaction process such as confirmation bias and anchoring bias
- Frameworks for effective questioning – using proven questioning frameworks to elicit candid responses from customers, dig deeper, and uncover latent needs and aspirations
- Iterative questioning – iterating to continuously refine and adapt questions as understanding of customer needs and market dynamics evolves
- Practical insights and key takeaways on promoting innovation and cultivating a customer-centric culture
- Customer Centric Innovation and Design Thinking
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models