SAP Business Challenge Network

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MIT Sloan Hackathon March 2022 – Enterprise Management Track: Developing innovative business models to transform the semiconductor industry supply chain

SAP brought its collaborative partnerships to the next level and built further relationships with our customers, and academic partners. SAP created new awareness of how we can work with the decision makers of tomorrow to bring fresh ideas when it comes to solving the pressing challenges of today’s business environment.

As part of the Enterprise Management (EM) Track offered in the MIT Sloan MBA program, SAP collaborated with professors and corporates (Intel, HPE, IBM, Wolfspeed, Infineon, Watlow, Formlabs) to present the following challenge to MIT’s MBA students: ‘How might we build a more resilient and stable semiconductor supply chain?’ By bringing together these companies that represent various components of the semiconductor supply chain, this joint hackathon sowed the seed to inspire new ideas on how to approach the challenges that the semiconductor industry has been facing.

SAP partners with its ecosystem to bring to live the MIT Sloan Hackathon March 2022 – Enterprise Management Track; Photo credits: jayesh.sandhu

Over 4 days, the hackathon involved an action-learning-based approach around how to innovate and solve business problems. The company representatives provided insights into how the semi-conductor supply chain issues are currently impacting their business and fostered an open dialog between the companies and the students to surface deeper insights into the nature of the supply chain problems. SAP employees led students through Design Thinking and business model innovation methodologies and supported them to apply these to create solutions for the presented business challenges.

On the final day of the Hackathon, the students pitched their ideas to the companies and presented the various solutions they developed, including semi-conductor marketplaces, predictive analytics for forecasting order variance across the supply chain, and extending the useful life of semi-conductors and components.

The hackathon hosted by MIT Sloan and supported by SAP as well as other corporates created a win-win-win situation for all the stakeholders involved. The event was more than simply inspiration for innovative opportunities, but also a meeting place to foster collaboration and fruitful exchanges to gain deeper insights into the crucial challenges across the semi-conductor ecosystem. As part of SAP’s Business Networks ambitions, this was the starting point to speak with and understand our customers in the semi-conductor ecosystem and kick off our semi-conductor business network, driven by the SAP New Business & Industry Strategy team. This hackathon marked the beginning of connecting with our customers, so that we as SAP can fulfil our mission of helping the world run better.

Photo credits: jayesh.sandhu