On May 3, 2025, UWEBC members gathered for an insightful Innovation Management Peer Group event, exploring how open innovation can dismantle organizational silos and generate meaningful business impact. Industry leaders showcased powerful examples of how cross-functional collaboration fuels strategic enterprise growth. Notably, the event featured the Connected Systems Institute (CSI) from UW-Milwaukee, further emphasizing the value of academic-industry partnerships in driving innovation.
Kicking off the event, Bella Oung, Senior Director of Digital and IT Portfolio Management at Regal Rexnord, shared how her team is transforming project intake and prioritization to drive enterprise-wide innovation. She discussed how open innovation, working across internal boundaries and with external partners, reshapes how their business makes decisions, allocates resources, and accelerates value.
Bella pointed out that 70% of businesses struggle with cross-functional collaboration in innovation. To address this challenge, Regal Rexnord established an Enterprise-wide IT Portfolio Management Office (EPMO), spearheaded by Bella. Within just over a year, the EPMO implemented a centralized SharePoint site for better project visibility, standardized request intake processes, and adopted Adobe Workfront to prioritize initiatives efficiently. With more than 150 project requests submitted annually, the EPMO now enables leadership to focus on the most impactful 20%, aligning resources and strategy.
Bella emphasized the company’s use of cutting-edge technologies, including generative AI chatbots, automation tools, and Snowflake’s data platform, to enhance efficiency and informed decision-making. Their internal chatbot AVA, for example, allows business users to pull data insights in seconds, while customer-facing bot Rexy improves the buyer experience on Regal Rexnord’s website.
A standout example was their annual internal hackathon, where cross-functional teams rapidly prototyped solutions, several of which became live products within months, including a successful new e-commerce platform and an employee-focused HR chatbot. Additionally, Regal Rexnord has formed external partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others to collaborate on GenAI solutions, staying future-ready in a fast-moving tech landscape.
Building on these insights, Ken Lutze from Rockwell Automation highlighted the critical role competitive intelligence plays in open innovation. Ken explained the “Four Voices” framework: business, market, technology, and customer, and how his team uses it to benchmark and evaluate emerging trends. He stressed the importance of challenging assumptions, using teardown analysis, software workflow comparisons, and figures of merit to help product teams make informed, strategic decisions.
Ken illustrated how benchmarking can reveal not only cost-saving opportunities but also deeper innovation potential. In one case, Rockwell identified gaps in user experience across competitive products, which helped sharpen their own development roadmap. He reminded the audience that in innovation, the goal isn’t to copy, but to cherry-pick the best ideas across the market to create something greater.
Concluding the speaker lineup, Franz Stoneking from Brady Corporation and Joe Hammond from the Connected Systems Institute (CSI) at UW-Milwaukee shared how their collaborative project brought open innovation to life through academic-industry partnership. The Connected Systems Institute (CSI) from UW-Milwaukee is a collaborative hub connecting academia and industry to advance digital manufacturing, further emphasizing the value of academic-industry partnerships in driving innovation. Together, Joe and Franz walked attendees through a compelling use case demonstrating how digital twins and smart manufacturing technologies were piloted effectively in a controlled academic environment, significantly reducing risk and accelerating their implementation into real-world industry applications. Their story highlighted the value of external partnerships in de-risking early-stage innovation while accelerating implementation timelines.
All of our incredible speakers emphasized that innovation doesn’t occur spontaneously; it thrives on clear communication, structured governance, and a mindset committed to continuous learning. They encouraged attendees to embrace transparency, actively invest in skills development, and foster robust internal and external partnerships to unlock innovation’s full potential sustainably.
UWEBC members can view the full event recording and download slides from the event here.