Janine ThiesHead of circular economy, BMW

Janine Thies describes a career that began in brand protection, working closely with government agencies including the FBI and CIA to identify and verify counterfeit automotive components and parts. It was a technical, investigative role with a precise specialization, and for years it defined her professional horizon.

The turning point came during a car ride with a CIA agent who asked her why she did the work she did. A simple question, the kind made in passing, but one that became a moment of clarity. The following week Thies submitted a proposal for the recycling of car wheels. Shortly after, she was assigned to a new internal project: recovering BMW components replaced by dealerships globally and reintegrating them into circular economy strategies through reuse, repair, refurbishment, or traditional recycling. The transition from brand protection to the circular economy ran along a deeper continuity: the same investigative eye, applied to a different purpose, from combating the counterfeit to recovering the genuine at end of life.

On a broader level, Thies is convinced that the shift toward a circular economy is inevitable. Every manufacturing company faces the same pressures today: inflation, resource scarcity, supply chain exposure. The answer, she argues, is not a single technology but a change of perspective. What one company treats as waste can become a valuable resource for another. Circularity in this sense is not just an internal business matter. It is a market dynamic between industries, with new business models forming around the reallocation of materials that would otherwise disappear.

What the interview reveals is an unusual professional trajectory: a manager who changed fields after a question asked in a car, and who brought BMW the investigative lens of brand protection, redirecting it from suppression to recovery. A career path that demonstrates that sustainable innovation does not grow only in laboratories, but also in people who decide to answer honestly when someone asks them what the point of their work is.