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SDenecken
Employee
Employee
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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 representing SAP as depicted in CrunchBase

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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