Every SAP Employee knows about the motto "SAP helps the world run better and improve people lives", but can we, as individuals have a significant impact?
In France, the SAP Fondation is co-organizing “impactathons” at SAP Labs with MakeSense. MakeSense is an organization which “accelerates the impact of social entrepreneurs by connecting them with supercool individuals ready to take up their challenges”. You may have heard of MakeSense as it has been one of the Google Impact Challenge finalists and a partner of a French government project “La France s’engage”.
These co-organized “Impactathons” are 2-hour Design Thinking sessions in which SAP employees are invited to solve a challenge faced by a social startup along with the entrepreneur and folks from MakeSense. From defining the business model to designing new functionalities for a website, the challenges are diverse and anyone can bring valuable inputs regardless to their day-to-day jobs.
Unlike pasts “impactathons”, February 18’s one was about MakeSense itself. More than 20 SAP employees answered the call and tried to solve the following challenge with 8 people of MakeSense “what tools can volunteers use to help MakeSense selecting social startups to promote?”. Indeed, with thousands of creative project around the world, it gets challenging to evaluate the social impact and how MakeSense could help those social entrepreneurs.
1 challenge in 2 hours with 30 people, how can it be?
The recipe secret is to mix people in small groups regardless to their company, job title, or skills and apply the Design Thinking favorite tools: food, post-its and fun!
First, each group needs to write down any number of proposal for solving the challenge leveraging the variety of experiences and ideas of its members. Then, groups write down an idea that would be impossible or too expensive to implement and pass it on to another group which has to try to solve it, triggering new perspectives and new ideas.
Once a fair amount of ideas is raised, the group then organize them a bit and present their proposal to the rest.
New ideas always come up during “Impactathons” and while employees are enjoying time with their colleagues or meeting new people, the entrepreneur gets a bunch of ideas out of it.
Thanks to the SAP Fondation, SAP employees can spend one day per year into social activities and some dedicate it to an entrepreneur met at an “Impactathons” converting ideas into reality.
From ideas to actions, everyone can help the world running better!
Links:
https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/france2015/charity/makesense
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