In our previous blog “Understanding the employee – or in tech speak: the end-user is the currency“, we have talked about the importance if being people centric. With this blog we want to emphasize the importance of co-innovation when designing the next generation of talent management applications.
Image via CrunchBase
Understanding what will be the present and the future of Talent Management and build the next generation of applications in that space, is a combination of SAP experience in the Human Resources market, where SAP has been leader for years, a deep understanding of trends and the competitors landscape and Co-Innovation with SAP customers – a program which is unique in the industry.
Co-Innovation offers the opportunity to expose the design and development of applications, specially the next generation, to customers and partners, where feedback is continuously incorporated whilst those applications are built. The vendor, in this case SAP, becomes a extension of the customer delivering the right product in the right moment, covering the right needs. Next generation solutions tend to be very forward thinking, therefore co-innovation delivers the right amount of innovation that the end user expects, making sure that adoption is not compromised.
SAP follows this concept and made the following important key aspects a part of the approach:
1. SAP allocates a co-innovation lead full time: reach out to customers and keep them engaged is tough, so either you make a product manager to work full time on it – or you allocate a special team to do so. SAP chose the later one and did built a skilled team to manage co-innovation.
2. Co-Innovation process is a buy-in with SAP and has clear management sponsorship: First of all, Co-Innovation is part of product management team since day one. It is in the DNA of SAP. Our co-CEOs do sponsor it, our management empower their employees to seek customer feedback. Everybody sees the value of building based on customer feedback.
3. Co-Innovation brings a strong customer pipeline: The co-innovation team comes from different former roles (sales, consulting, market development, market analyst) sampling together great customer experience. That brings a strong understanding of how to build the right customer pipeline and gather the right group to engage with.
4. Co-Innovation engaging customers: Co-Innovation focuses on offering a value proposition that works for both – SAP and the customers. A deep understanding of how to manage customer expectations, being a customer advocate and keep value in the conversation, ensures the success in terms of a sustainable engagement
5. Co-Innovation understands when and how customer workshop needs to be executed. As a example, Co-Innovation facilitated, executed and lead more than 250 hours in from of customers to understand and design next generation of talent management applications. The co-innovation lead assess the right moment to have this sessions, ensures enough time is allocated for digesting the information and plans a cadence of workshops to foster the concepts. The Co-Innovation lead also ensures that feedback is capture internally and brought back into the respective mock-ups, waves, releases. The feedback is continually shared with customers via SAP Streamwork to make sure that information captured relates to what the customer wants.
SAP uses co-innovation as a new way of desinging applications. Next generation of talent management will serve customers and even more important the people working for them. SAP co-innovation will make sure that their voice is heard, and if there are customers interested on engaging with SAP, co-innovation is happy to engage.
Related blogs to know about co-innovation:
SAP’s Golden Opportunity to use Co-Innovation to Make better Software
Necessity, Scotch Tape, Rubberbands (or how innovation accelerates)
Let us know what you think. Regards Eduardo (@esdediego) and Sven (@SDenecken) …
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