For many of us, the last days of October mean last-minute preparations for Halloween, stocking up on sweets for trick-o-treaters, finding that perfect pumpkin for jack-o-lantern, or putting finishing touches to costumes of little witches, devils and harry potters. For 26 students from Hasso Plattner Institute, EISTI, Eurecom, SKEMA Business School, Polytech Nice Sophia, CampusID, University of Bolzano though, the last 2 days of October meant
something very different: meeting up at SAP's long term research and education partner Eurecom’s new facilities on the new Campus SophiaTech of the international science park of Sophia Antipolis in France at 8:30am for the SAP Business By Design Mobility InnoJam.
The organization of this first French SAP InnoJam was not a small affair and the organizational committee, fittingly dressed in orange, was looking forward to finally welcoming the participants after months of preparation. To support SAP University Alliances team (Boukli Marouan, Alexandra Darras, Karla Baca), different teams from SAP Labs France SAS (SAP Active Global Support Solution Support (Caroline Testard), SAP Business Intelligence Advanced Development (David Trastour), SAP Product Security Research ( Jean-Christophe Pazzaglia), and SAP Solution Manager Mobile development (Mabrouk Amine, Zubataia Tatiana and me)) faciliated by the SAP Developer Experience team (Vayssiere Julien), in addition to neighbour and partner of Eurecom, and SAP Partner Ubister (Pierre Gueguen) all worked together to make sure everything was ready when teams arrived.
There was another first at this SAP InnoJam: the possibility of virtual participation. The participating teams discovered on their arrival an additional remote competitor: a highly motivated team from Sup’com Tunis (or Higher School of Communication of Tunis).
In the first part of the 1st day, the BizFire and TechFire sessions took place with speakers presenting the basics and concepts of SAP Business by Design, as well as SAP Cloud Application Studio and SAP Mobile technologies. In-between the two presentations was the highlight activity of the day: Design Thinking. Each team was coached by two SAP Design Thinking coaches. Out of three challenges, the teams chose the one they felt more interested in and started researching creative solutions. The walls, desk, flipcharts and whiteboards quickly and surely got covered in post-its and drawings of all colours, with ideas and findings popping up from everywhere.
The competitive spirit of the teams started to spread, which brought additional fun to the presentation of prototypes. Make sure you do not miss the most
entertaining presentation by the “6 Fingers” team.
In the evening of the first day each team received a laptop with SAP Cloud Application Studio installed and was ready to start implementing their ideas. The work for some teams continued throughout the night and the organizers met some very sleepy faces when they came back in the morning.
The second day, with everyone hard at work coding was a big contrast to the noise and commotion of the first day. The SAP and Ubister experts present on hand were hard at work to take care of teams and make sure they did not get stalled by technical or functional issues.
When presentation time came up, tired but happy participants, organizing committee and jury members gathered together for the fast-paced InnoFire. 3 teams present locally and the remote team in Tunis each had 5 minutes to demo their work to the jury presided by SAP Labs France SAS Managing
Director and SAP InnoJam sponsor Hanno KLAUSMEIER. The last bits of energy were gathered and as usual at SAP Jams - the best presentation was very entertaining.
While participants have had time to enjoy a well-deserved cocktail, the jury had a difficult task to find a winner among the four very deserving teams. The final decision was pronounced by SAP Labs France SAS Managing Director Hanno KLAUSMEIER after 30 minutes of hard deliberations and greeted by tons of applause in the room and on the phone – as the winning team was one from Sup'Com Tunis. Well done to the winners for their hard work and determination to participate in SAP InnoJam remotely.
If you or your SAP ByDesign customer needs a solution for efficient business card or time entry in their system via mobile phone – the SAP InnoJam participants have it! SAP Partner Ubister has also appreciated participation in the event and are considering organizing a similar event together with SAP in their “home” Brittany area of France which counts several high profile engineering schools and is the second French region for telecommunication
and the fifth for electronics. We hope more SAP InnoJams to follow in France!
I also would like to use this opportunity to encourage other SAP Labs around the world to either organize their own SAP InnoJam or join together in a large-scale virtual InnoJam. The participation of colleagues remotely in our SAP InnoJam was a success, let’s build on this experience and organize a virtual SAP InnoJam between different teams from SAP Labs, SAP customers or SAP Partners! Anybody on? – SAP HANA on Cloud, 3-4 challenges for the best SAP HANA mobile app, teams of 5-8 people, 48 hours of coding and best app selected by SAP’s senior managers – does it spark anybody’s enthusiasm? Just contact me and we can try to make it happen!
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