Principal Innovation Ecosystem | Adelaide

About BHP

At BHP we support our people to grow, learn, develop their skills and reach their potential. With a global portfolio of operations, we offer a diverse and inclusive environment with extraordinary career opportunities. Our strategy is to focus on creating a safe work environment where our employees feel strongly connected to our values and objectives, and where the capability of our people is key to our success.

Come and be a part of this success.

About the Role

Key Accountabilities:

• Lead the identification, evaluation, and end-to-end experience management of external partners (startups to OEMs) engaging with BHP Invent, ensuring a high-quality and consistent ecosystem experience.
• Drive the growth and maturation of global innovation ecosystem by cultivating partnerships and enabling effective commercial pathways for scaling external solutions into mining operations, specially as it relates to BHP’s Minerals Australia operations.
• Assess and prioritise opportunities by balancing market intelligence, strategic alignment, and commercial scalability across BHP’s focus areas.
• Orchestrate and influence across a complex stakeholder landscape, demonstrating strong cross-functional leadership and the ability to drive decisions under time constraints.
• Translate early-stage innovation into enterprise value by defining pathways to scale, moving beyond pilot success to sustainable industry adoption.
• Design and deliver a human-centric, fast-fail learning environment, enabling data-driven continuous improvement of ecosystem engagement.

About You

Who We’re Looking For

• Exceptional stakeholder engagement and influence, with the ability to operate credibly from senior executives to startup founders.
• Strong analytical capability, with a track record of generating insights, identifying patterns, and improving systems and decision-making frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience in assessing external technologies, ventures, or innovation opportunities, with the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments.
• Strong commercial acumen, including experience with partnership structuring, deal shaping, and technology commercialisation pathways.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to translate complex ideas into clear, actionable insights.
• A structured and organised approach, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deliver outcomes in fast-paced environments.
• Familiarity with industrial technology, mining, or adjacent heavy industry ecosystems (desirable).

About Our Process

At BHP, we are committed to employing individuals who align with the BHP Charter Values and meet the requirements of the role. As part of the recruitment process, there are a number of checks which may be conducted to demonstrate applicants suitability for a role including police / criminal background checks, medical, drug and alcohol testing, due diligence checks, right to work checks, and/or reference checks.

If you are already employed directly by BHP, please log in using your BHP email address or apply via our internal jobs portal.

Supporting a Diverse Workforce

The size, stability and magnitude of our business not only provides significant opportunity for professional development, but also attractive salary packages with performance-based bonuses and a best-in-class employee share program. We know there are many aspects of our employees' lives that are important, and work is only one of these, so we offer benefits to enable your work to fit with your life. These benefits include flexible working options, a generous paid parental leave policy, other extended leave entitlements and parent rooms.

At BHP, we know that we are strengthened by diversity. We are an Equal Opportunity employer that is committed to making BHP a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and be at their best every day. We are focused on creating a workforce that’s more diverse and represents the communities where we work and live. providing a work environment in which everyone is included, treated fairly and with respect. We are an Equal Opportunity employer and recognise that true diversity includes gender, age, race, disability status, sexual orientation, religion, neurodiversity, education levels, and many more aspects of your identity.

BHP is committed to providing a recruitment process that is fair, equitable and accessible for all. If you have a disability, we know that it may be helpful for us to adjust our process to make it equitable for your individual situation. If you would like to reach out to someone about your situation and our recruitment process, please email us at inclusion@bhp.com.