Munich. Exclusive technological expertise for
everyone: The BMW Group has made its Trend Radar public. The
technology sector’s trend research website bundles the key findings of
the global BMW Technology Offices in the USA, Germany, Israel, Japan,
Korea, Singapore, and China. Global trend research allows the company
to draw conclusions about future technological developments. As part
of the open access approach, these results will be immediately
processed in the Trend Radar and made available externally, meaning
scientific institutions, start-ups, as well as potential partners can
use them. BMW wants to start a dialogue with them using this approach,
which has never been implemented in the automotive industry before.
This will promote open exchange on tech trends across industries and
encourage cooperation.
Frank Weber, Member of the Board of Management for Development at BMW
AG, explains the initiative: “For me, one thing is clear: innovation
is created in the spaces in between, i.e., through interaction. By
openly publishing our Tech Radar, we want to start a dialogue with
potential partners. Research and development do not work without an
outside-in perspective.”
Trends: from theory to execution
To identify the most interesting technology developments from
manufacturing and science, scouts from the Technology Offices evaluate
innovations based on three questions: (1) What relevance does the
technology have for mobility? (2) How quickly is its development
maturing? (3) What does the BMW Group need to know to successfully
apply the technology? This results in a trend portfolio that is
recommended for close observation (Watch), initial projects
(Prepare), or concrete, agile application (Act).
In the BMW Group, trend research and technology scouting are not just
art for art’s sake. More than half of the 400 projects that the
Technology Offices have initiated since 2019 stemming from identified
trends have been transferred internally to a specialist department. Of
these, ten per cent found their way into concrete applications and
products – five times more than what is usually the case when
transferring innovations into practice. One example is the BMW iX’s
iDrive panel. Special laser processing perforates the wood of the
control panel in such a way that digital displays underneath shine
through and can be operated if required. This application goes back to
technologies discovered by Technology Offices in Japan and Korea.
BMW Group’s Trend Radar is now publicly available
The Tech Radar can be accessed through the website: https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/innovation/company/technology-trend-radar.html.
Institutions and companies interested in cooperation can contact the
project team at the following e-mail address: [email protected].
In the current version, the Tech Radar lists 24 trends. These include
technologies such as Acoustic Analytics, which is used by the BMW
Group in fault diagnostics during vehicle production. Other examples
are virtual worlds, for which the BMW Group relies on NVIDIA
Omniverse, among others, and the key IT topic, quantum computing. BMW
Group IT has been tracking and processing progress in this area since
2017. The results were incorporated into the Quantum Technology &
Application Consortia (QUTAC) initiative, among others. The
overarching goal is to bring industry-relevant applications for the
BMW Group to market maturity.
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