New Florence. New Renaissance.

"Digital Body Language"

"Digital body language is an art and science that revolves around detecting and understanding prospective buyers' signals and intentions to better communicate with them. The transition that began a decade ago with the arrival of the Internet and its many new sources of information, will require a significant rethinking on the part of marketers, sales professionals, and the organizations they serve."

Steve Woods of eloqua summarizing themese from his recent book on sandhill.com

If I was 25 again...

...I would join a SAP customer and lobby to become part of the SAP Imagineering Fellowship program. SAP experimented with the program last year with Colgate-Palmolive and is in the process of expanding to a handful of newer customers. 

I say that after I spent another hour with Denis Browne heads that group for SAP. I had lunch with him a few weeks before. This time we appropriately in a "virtual meeting" (using Adobe's Connect) and he gave me a 50,000 foot view on some of the projects his group is working on:

• Widgets which allow for much more graphical presentation of enterprise CRM and other data
• Presentation of external RSS and other feeds alongside internal enterprise data
• "Mirror worlds" which link virtual and physical models via SAP's configurator and other functionality
• Enterprise Knowledge Networking - "Facebook" in a corporate setting
• "The Business Internet" - leveraging RFID and other sensors in the enterprise 
•  A crowd-sourced "Idea marketplace" to allow for prioritization of ideas for the Group

As Dan Farber wrote last year, none of this is really that revolutionary and I have been impatient with SAP's rate of innovation - but as Denis likes to frequently point out, SAP is the custodian in which thousands of customers put faith, so any innovation has to be filtered with that caution. Which brings us back to the Fellowship program. One way to make customers more comfortable is to have them second employees.

Denis invited me to come to his his lab at Palo Alto for a hands-on visit . When I go, I will try and sneak around to see if they have "Back to the Future" technology there which can turn my age back to 25:)

SAP's Hidden Innovations

A few years ago, doing some research on telemetry, I came across a book on RFID. The author's name sounded familiar. Sure enough when I checked, it was Claus Heinrich, a SAP Executive I dealt with while at Gartner. He was always on the front lines of supply chain management in the mid-90s and so I was not surprised to see him summarize numerous RFID implementations at a number of SAP (and other) customers.

SAP is not a consulting firm and does not actively encourage its executives to write books or articles on innovation, but if it did you would see plenty of examples of pioneering work SAP does in a number of areas.

Instead, most of SAP's publicity in the last few years has been around big, broad innovation areas - like NetWeaver, SOA and its SDN community. And more recently around its SaaS offering, BusinessByDesign and its Business Objects acquisition.

So, in the meantime what SAP Research is doing around wearable technology does not get much play. Ditto with what it is doing in virtualization with VMWare. Or with SPSS around predictive analytics. Or with iPhone support. Or XApps for Mobile Business. In fact, if you look at the innovation categories I track on this blog, SAP is pioneering early work in just about every category.

Even more importantly, its customers are developing innovative extensions around the SAP engine in various verticals. Or are early, joint development "co-innovators" in a number of new areas.

3M became known as an innovation leader because of its ability to unleash hundreds of products, not all successful. Same with Google.

You get the feeling if the initiative is not big and bold, SAP's "aw shucks" about it. And yet it cringes when its big, core projects run long and over budget. As they do often.

If you see my MAGIC definition of innovation, it is about early, alpha technology. It is about intense, small projects. It is about being open to ideas from global pools of talent around the world. It is about tangible business process results.

What SAP needs is an innovation in its own positioning. It needs to move to positioning its "swarm" of innovations, not just one or two big ones every few years. Unleash the work of hundreds of Claus-es. Even better showcase what its customers are doing in those hundreds of points of innovation.