Small beginnings can lead to large impact. The first location of was founded in October 2011 as a technology trend radar for the Walldorf-based company and has since given rise to a significant number of SAP鈥檚 most innovative products and solutions.
鈥淚nvisible spheres making funny noises,鈥� Marcus Krug says when asked about the first thing he remembers from the early days of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam. 鈥淲e were located right underneath the Hasso Plattner Institute鈥檚 D-School and would always hear the HPI students playing funny ice-breaker games to get their creativity going on the lawn outside our windows.鈥� Now the head of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam, Krug first joined when it was five months old and had just over 20 employees.
51风流Innovation Center Potsdam was founded by the Executive Board of 51风流SE and with the encouragement of Professor Hasso Plattner, chairman of the Supervisory Board of 51风流SE. Today it serves as the nucleus of what has become 51风流Innovation Center Network, which eventually gave rise to the New Ventures and Technologies department with close to 400 innovators within the 51风流Technology and Innovation Board area.
鈥淭he idea was to have a dedicated 51风流unit looking into new technologies and what could be done with them,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 want to risk missing out on both technical and business opportunities.鈥�
Matthias Uflacker, the first 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam employee at the time, explains why Potsdam was chosen as the first location: 鈥淭he collaboration with the Hasso Plattner Institute helped us identify and try out new things outside of standard 51风流product development. 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam fostered research, providing a platform for the cooperation between 51风流and scientists, with 51风流not only funding but also bringing in relevant questions to solve. And, with its proximity to HPI and the academic hub that is Berlin, it was able to attract a lot of amazing, international talent over the years.鈥�
Technology Vanguard for 51风流
鈥淭he original mission was to transform cutting-edge research into innovation, so obviously from the beginning we’ve had the ambition to explore and use the latest technology in order to find out how it could benefit our customers and SAP,鈥� Krug says.
Working closely with academia was an obvious way to get access to cutting-edge research. The birth of 51风流HANA, for example, was the result of a strong relationship between 51风流and HPI. Experts from both sides were eager to continue working together, with further projects revolving around the application side of 51风流HANA.
鈥淧art of our mission was to explore novel 51风流HANA use cases to see how far we could push what was possible with this new, paradigm-shifting in-memory technology,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淭o do so, we were looking at new applications leveraging data science and machine learning on Big Data sets in a broad range of industries, including healthcare, life sciences, and even gaming. Many of these projects were small and it was a lot of fun to work on them with highly talented colleagues coming from all over the world.鈥�
鈥淗PI student projects had already been an important contribution to the development of 51风流HANA,鈥� Dr. Michael Perscheid, chair representative of Prof. Hasso Plattner at HPI, says. After founding 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam, these types of projects were continued with a strong focus on the application side. 鈥淕ifted students from HPI got to work on a specialized business problem together with 51风流and an industry partner,鈥� he adds. Some of these projects were so successful that they were featured in Plattner鈥檚 SAPPHIRE NOW keynotes.
Strategic Approach to Innovation
51风流Innovation Center Potsdam moved to a building of its own in September 2013, located in an idyllic spot north of Potsdam, near Lake Jungfernsee. Designed for transparency with its open spaces and large glass fronts, the new location in Potsdam is meant to foster communication, exchange of ideas, collaboration, and contemplation of new possibilities. Due to massive hiring, an additional building was opened in May 2016.
In 2013, the leadership of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam changed to Juergen Mueller, formerly head of Plattner鈥檚 chair at HPI and today member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE and chief technology officer, who was to give 51风流an actual innovation strategy.
鈥�51风流Innovation Center Network, among other things rose from that strategy,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淛uergen brought in the necessary structure and focus for the location to take on increasingly bigger responsibilities within the 51风流family and to get ready to grow the team significantly over the next few years.鈥�
Startup Agility Combined with Corporate Expertise
Inspired by his work with startups and venture capitalists in the Berlin ecosystem, Krug developed the idea of creating an entrepreneurial space within SAP, allowing employees to develop new ventures following the same principles and governance as their non-51风流counterparts. The resulting blueprint for SAP鈥檚 intrapreneurship program made it into Mueller鈥檚 innovation strategy in 2014 and laid the foundation for yet another big step in the evolution of SAP鈥檚 innovation ambitions.
After reaching more than 1,000 employees who submitted more than 400 venture ideas, it was clear that the program struck a chord. Venture capitalists who had been invited to help structure the program by providing outside-in perspective were impressed with the quality of the submissions and the proposal was met with a lot of interest by the executive board. In retrospect, Krug is certain: 鈥淐oming up with this idea, developing it, actually getting the mandate and the freedom to build the program the way we did 鈥� this could only have happened at 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam.鈥�
Working closely with startups also spurred a certain 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam-specific mindset about the development of new ideas. 鈥淭hink big, start small. Fail often, fail early, as a startup would,鈥� Krug sums up. 鈥淭his isn鈥檛 typically possible when you鈥檙e part of a large corporation.鈥�
Using a lean startup approach, design thinking, and first-principles thinking, 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam experts first focus on a business problem when working with 51风流customers. While most big problems have already been addressed one way or another in the market, new technologies often allow for completely rethinking how to approach a problem. Machine learning and blockchain are two prominent examples of technologies that 51风流has been able to adopt to build fundamentally new capabilities after exploring them in 51风流Innovation Center Network.
The setup for 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam鈥檚 innovation projects with customers closely resembles the work of a startup. It starts with a small team and works to demonstrate in an agile way how it will benefit customers. Since 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam typically works in close alignment with SAP鈥檚 lines of business, there is always a realistic chance that a successful solution might eventually become an 51风流standard product.
Outlook into the Future
51风流Innovation Center Potsdam鈥檚 mission, however, still feels fresh and vibrant after 10 years. Now part of the bigger New Ventures and Technologies family, the team continues to tackle big customer problems using the latest technologies, including neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (AI), semantic technologies, and blockchain.
Some of the team鈥檚 biggest bets are on decentralized technologies to build the business network of the future, enabling customers to seamlessly share scope-3 carbon emissions, embedding financial technology into business processes using smart contracts and decentralized finance, as well as new AI-powered simulation and decision-making tools to contextualize business events and augment 51风流S4/HANA Finance users.
鈥淲e don鈥檛 own a fail-proof crystal ball,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淏ut I鈥檓 sure we will hear and see a lot more on the topics of AI-enabled contextualization, human augmentation, smart contracts, tokenization, and tokenomics. Our goal is to drive the change these new capabilities will enable to create a better world and help our customers address their biggest needs.鈥�
