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.

Comments

[Craig Cmehil]

There has been a ot of movement around this topic inside of SAP lately. More and more of the really interesting projects are starting to move up into the realm of visibility.

Still not 100% "out there" but internally we've one a fantastic environment for fostering and growing ideas. From a community angle we've a big focus on the topic and are pushing hard to break down walls, barriers and bring both internal as well as customer innovations, ideas and prototypes to the outside world.