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Former Member
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I have often been impressed by the large number of creative and innovative minds at SAP. Surprisingly, most of those minds are quite unknown both inside and outside of SAP. Furthermore – and unfortunately – their work is often as unknown as they are. Learning about such work has always been energizing and inspiring for me. Couldn’t it be the same for others? Couldn’t it be that by sharing it, exposing it to numerous and diverse backgrounds and eyes, and discussing about it inside and outside of SAP, when applicable, such work could inspire others, spread creativity and innovativeness to others and benefit to the entire SAP Community Network?

Seven years of  SAP TechEd Demo Jam competitions have made ideas and innovative work of the SAP communities more visible and have significantly grown in interest and participation over the years. Unfortunately those competitions are not well suited for all types of ideas and work: finalists and winners are most likely those with entertaining or visual demos. How could we bring more light, a window, to all types of ideas and work?

This is what a few of us at SAP have started to work on about 6 months ago.

We never had any doubt that the SAP Community Network web site could be a potential channel: SCN is huge, the communities are diverse with SAP employees, customers, partners and others, and the SCN web site is popular. That’s where we started to look.

In SCN we found several areas that were already sharing about innovation at SAP, some of them like the BusinessObjects Innovation Center having become quite popular. Unfortunately those areas are not connected to each other and sometimes not obvious to relate to innovation.

Initial thoughts led us on a path to create two new areas on SDN: one about SAP’s Technology Strategy, to share about the work of my team, and another one about innovation, to share as much as possible about the work of all SAP innovation teams. Our objective was to reuse as much as possible of existing areas and content when both possible and appropriate.

After some further thoughts some of us had some doubts that the SAP’s Technology Strategy would be dynamic enough to deserve its own independent area. We soon decided to combine the Technology Strategy area and the Innovation area into a single one that we would call Technology Innovation.

And here we are: after a few months and several iterations with several colleagues and SAP mentors, we are ready to launch the new Technology Innovation area.

Its main features are: SAP’s Technology Strategy, an innovation news series that features a new innovation – project, prototype, idea, scientific paper, etc.  - every week or 2 weeks and, a video series that features SAP executives speaking about hot technology topics such as On Demand, Mobile, Cloud management, Virtualization infrastructure, In-Memory. In addition we list all the different ways in which anyone from SCN could get involved in Technology Innovation and co-innovate with SAP.

Check it out and tell us what you think on Idea Place.I hope that the new area will bring more light on all creative ideas and work of SAP employees and members of SAP Community Network. I hope that the new area will “dial-up” your desire to team up with all of us at SAP whose mission is to make SAP innovate more, faster and better.

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