鈥淐omposable enterprise from an organizational perspective means you can recompose processes dynamically and rearrange based on interchangeable building blocks when needed, without specialist knowledge or a developer,鈥� said Martin Heinig, head of New Ventures and Technologies at SAP. 鈥淲e are exploring the business logic in current 51风流ERP systems to make it more agile and adaptable without sacrificing core values like compliance and reliability. What鈥檚 more, if you use disconnected tools today, you might have an audit problem, while third-party software might cause integration issues. The question for us is how a future 51风流system can help companies overcome these challenges successfully.鈥�

Heinig鈥檚 remarks were part of a session at the event, where he outlined some of the exciting research his team was working on to make the composable business vision a reality.

Business Benefits Beyond Traditional Software

While there鈥檚 little doubt about the value of a composable business strategy where companies can dynamically respond to market changes, building that kind of platform will require rethinking traditional software development approaches including standardization, data harmonization, and semantics to make sure the company can still run its end-to-end business processes. Heinig simplified the challenge using an example of a supermarket chain that wanted to quickly source and sell more oat milk to meet suddenly spiking consumer demands.

鈥淪elling oat milk to consumers, the supermarket is doing business with farmers, wholesalers, and other providers,鈥� he said. 鈥淭o source a new product like this, the company needs to conduct a credibility check of external suppliers. The composable platform would allow the supermarket to conduct that check easily across order management through fulfillment, sourcing from trusted suppliers and getting the product on shelves to satisfy local consumer demands.鈥�

Rethinking ERP Software for Composability

Customers do not want business software. They want digital business processes that grow with them according to Ralf Teusner, who joined Heinig on stage to talk about the research he was involved with at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Teusner said his research was focused on challenging assumptions about software to explore how to build the world鈥檚 most standardized custom software. Admittedly an academic exercise, this research is nonetheless focused on how to rethink ERP software for the modern world. After talking with people from companies of all sizes, they concluded that data was most important when making any kind of change.

鈥淲e鈥檙e looking at a process execution architecture that鈥檚 value-driven, and because we鈥檙e at university, we are not afraid of breaking things,鈥� said Teusner. 鈥淲e discovered that data migration and process integration are the major challenges for companies. Unless we jointly address data as well as control flow in end-to-end business processes, each change management [project] can break business continuity.鈥�

Composability Democratizes Innovation

Among the many questions that researchers face in creating a composable process platform are what functionalities will be part of the existing stable core and what a reusable business component will look like, not to mention the execution architecture, scalability, software and common languages used, and KPI tracking. Both Teusner and Heinig saw the transition as a years-long vision to achieve in partnership with academia. Composability could result in greater openness for partners across an organization鈥檚 ecosystem, giving other companies easier access to innovations. Of course, this potentially upends traditional technology sector intellectual property (IP) norms.

鈥淭o make this a reality, you need an engineer鈥檚 mindset,鈥� said Teusner. 鈥淩ight now, CIOs guard their data because it鈥檚 core to their business and it鈥檚 their IP. They鈥檙e not ready yet, but maybe they will be in five years鈥ou鈥檙e democratizing how to configure the system, leading to adaptability for greater business efficiencies.鈥�

definition of a composable business is 鈥渁n organization that is architected for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.鈥� In this day and age, there鈥檚 no stronger argument for moving ahead to achieve that vision.

Follow me @smgaler.

While enthusiasm grows for machine intelligence, there must also be a greater focus on giving humans the necessary tools to understand and take complex decisions. In our view, insights that result in data-heavy dashboards will have limited value if users cannot understand or apply the vast amounts of newly uncovered data, especially unstructured data coming from social, demographic, cultural, or complex scientific outputs.

suggests that 25% of the world鈥檚 2,000 largest public companies will invest in new knowledge networks that include automated process as well as behavioral and interactional information capture and dissemination to improve enterprise learning by 2024, especially learning that is hyper-personalized and hyper-contextualized.

To improve learning, we must do more to understand what knowledge is truly relevant.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, 鈥淭alent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.鈥� This makes me focus on what future IT systems and decision makers actually 鈥渟ee.鈥� Whatever they see must be in run-time composition, hyper-personal, and able to augment people to leverage intelligence in new ways.

Imagine a System That Provides the Right Data at the Right Time

Augmentation is not necessarily new. We鈥檙e already augmented in our daily lives when we write a text and get recommendations for better wording or when we search Netflix for a movie we might like.

But it is a different story when it comes to finding new ways to augment how people perform and interact at work. Imagine a digital system that truly knows the user and their job to be done, including understanding their immediate needs. Such a future feature in any digital system would become a representation of the user and the way they work, including their preferences, profiles, and even personal ambitions, passions, and future goals.

We believe that software should innately help people — to let them be at the center of their specific job to be done. For this to come to life, such a system will first need to be safe, secure, and privately owned by each of the users. It must harvest, analyze, and serve the findings back to any API, app, and person to which the owner allows it to be served.

This vision of future enterprise software leads to my extreme excitement to bring human ingenuity together with machine intelligence. One way we are exploring this at 51风流is through an integrated set of intelligent platform capabilities we call “Digital ME.” These capabilities give users exactly the data they need when they need it through contextualization and hyper-personalization. As a result, those systems can take care of mundane work or point users to opportunities for personal or professional development.

Access Control Made Easy

Such augmentation at enterprise scale might only be available in a decade, but some projects already make use of this concept today. One area is augmented access control. Compromised login credentials and access permissions are often a gateway into the corporate network, and therefore need to be carefully protected against threats such as ransomware, phishing, malware, and, more generally, criminal hackers.

Currently, managing access to enterprise data and assets is a highly manual task. Soon, with the growth of data and apps, a digital representation of the person to get access could streamline the end-to-end process of obtaining frictionless access by providing context and a history trail about the user and match their needs. Is the access needed permanently or only temporarily? How will the data be used? Is it necessary to first obtain approval from a supervisor before requesting access? The digital representation could help humans anticipate these access requirements and gather the necessary information to facilitate access, increasing productivity and enabling quicker business decisions.

The need and potential of augmentation are emerging almost everywhere. Let鈥檚 take the area of finance: the future CFO could make more impactful strategic capital allocation and budget planning by obtaining contextualized and hyper-personalized data to understand and take actions on a web of causalities like cross-organizational processes, digital asset integrations, and compliance restrictions. This is just one example of how 51风流will connect enterprise and human genius in the coming decade and help redefine human decision-making through augmentation.

Martin Wezowski is chief futurist and head of Future Hub for 51风流New Ventures & Technologies.

鈥淥nly because they failed to recognize the signs of the times,鈥� says Heinig. 鈥淚t was sad to watch and terrible for the workforce. People asked themselves, 鈥楬ow could that happen to our company in particular?鈥� That bothered me for a long time. Could we have prevented this downfall? And if so, when and how should we have changed course?鈥�

Today, a decade and a half later, Heinig heads the New Ventures and Technologies area at SAP. It explores this very question, which is more relevant than ever for many companies around the world: how can a successful company stay innovative and manage its own technologies and business models with an eye to the future?

The Road to SAP

鈥淚鈥檇 be exaggerating if I said that my experience at Blaupunkt predetermined the direction my career would take,鈥� says Heinig. 鈥淏ut the company did have a certain influence on my family and my life.鈥� Heinig鈥檚 parents met each other for the first time at Blaupunkt, after his mother moved to Germany from Turkey as a young woman. Heinig grew up in a village near Hildesheim in Germany, but he regularly spent his summers in Turkey.

鈥淢y mother鈥檚 family is from Ankara, so I grew up bilingual, which I always saw as a great advantage,鈥� says Heinig, who was the first in his family to earn a doctorate. 鈥淓ducation was important to my parents, but they never checked whether I did my homework. They didn鈥檛 have the time for that. It was simply understood: if you want to achieve something, you have to do the work.鈥�

That meant a high level of personal responsibility from the start, but also the freedom to decide what he wanted to do with his life. 鈥淚t all started with a Schneider PCP, followed by an Amiga 500, and later I decided to major in business informatics at the University of G枚ttingen because IT was what interested me the most and what promised to be the most fun.鈥�

Heinig spent a semester abroad in Paris, so he speaks pretty good French in addition to German, Turkish, and English. After earning his master鈥檚 degree, he worked as a software developer for two years before starting a dissertation at TU Hamburg on the use of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) in manufacturing. Towards the end of this four-year doctoral phase, Martin accepted a position at the newly founded 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam and moved to Berlin.

He laughs at the memory: 鈥淐olleagues, fellow students, practically everyone I knew asked me if I was really sure that joining 51风流would be a sensible step in my career.鈥�

鈥淏ut I was sure,鈥� says Heinig. 鈥淭here was a real pioneering spirit at 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam. Everyone was full of ideas and creative drive.鈥�

From 51风流Innovation Center Network to New Ventures and Technologies

This first of what has become nine innovation centers worldwide today was led at the time by Dr. Juergen Mueller, who is now a member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE and chief technology officer. Over the next few years, the seed in Potsdam grew into 51风流Innovation Center Network, which serves as a kind of trend radar and think tank for 51风流and is now part of Heinig鈥檚 New Ventures and Technologies domain.

鈥淏ack then, we liked to use the metaphor of 51风流as an oil tanker聽鈥� and was a speedboat,鈥� says Martin. 鈥淲e wanted to be agile and flexible, try out new technologies and ideas, but also be able to drop them effortlessly if it became apparent that they wouldn鈥檛 go anywhere.鈥�

Martin says one of the most important lessons he learned from this time was that think tanks have to be well connected with product departments and maintain regular contact with the lines of business.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 a cornerstone of our work in New Ventures and Technologies today, too,鈥� he explains. 鈥淗ow can you establish early collaboration with the lines of business to enable them to incorporate new technologies, solutions, and products?鈥�

Having served as director of 51风流Labs Berlin since August 2018, Heinig was appointed head of New Ventures and Technologies in February 2021. His years of experience as COO under Juergen Mueller served him well here: 鈥淪eizing the reins, setting the agenda myself, that part was new for me. But I was already familiar with all the topics from my support role.鈥�

In addition to 51风流Innovation Center Network, a number of other 51风流departments also belong to New Ventures and Technologies.

鈥淭hey all work on innovation and new technologies in some way,鈥� says Heinig, “but each has a different focus and different partners within the 51风流ecosystem. We鈥檙e not a line organization. There are many different functions in our organization, which I had to learn about in detail as the new head before I could assemble my leadership team and we could define a strategic framework together that everyone could identify with and find their place in.鈥�

A Vision of Innovation

In this forward-looking approach, all departments within New Ventures and Technologies were involved and asked for their perspectives. 鈥淭his inclusive method proved to be very important to the success of the agenda,鈥� says Heinig. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 just politely ask the employees to be innovative. The ideas need to fit with SAP鈥檚 portfolio and strategy as smoothly as possible, as both continue to evolve in the future.鈥�

Instead, the team focused on defining the right vision of innovation for SAP. 鈥淲hat might our future look like and where do we want to go?鈥� were the most important questions, according to Heinig. 鈥淎nd then to think back from there: what steps will get us there, what issues do we need to resolve, and what needs to happen for us to be able to resolve them?鈥�

Three core units are responsible for anticipating major changes, in harmony with the current 51风流strategy and product portfolio.

Heinig explains: 鈥淔irst of all, we envision the next level of the ERP systems as a kind of platform that makes it possible to put business processes and individual functions together as needed. As such, this composability architecture is a key focus of our current work, with which we want to empower our customers to use subprocesses as individual modules.鈥�

The second development involves the handling of data. 鈥淚nstead of the current usual method of displaying and analyzing data in a dashboard that you defined yourself beforehand, it will be possible to involve the system in this selection in future,鈥� Heinig says. The magic word here is 鈥榗ontextualization.鈥� 鈥淪ystems will evolve to the point where they can recognize my current context as a user and supply me with information on their own accord, without me having to request it explicitly,鈥� he adds.

In addition, the Finance and Accounting area and its standards and KPIs for steering business will change. 鈥淎s we see it, sustainability aspects have to be given much greater weight in reporting,鈥� says Heinig. 鈥淭o achieve this, we need a separate accounting system and sustainability KPIs have to be integrated in the 51风流core system.鈥�

A Culture of Trust and Transparency

With nearly 300 full-time employees and a large number of students, New Ventures and Technologies consists of 10 branch offices worldwide. Martin鈥檚 goal for this teamwork is to establish a culture of personal responsibility. Instead of simply assigning topics, the responsible employees should be empowered to develop them on their own.

鈥淭he most important thing is a relationship of mutual trust,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 often talk about budget issues in team meetings and provide information about my own work. Other department heads in New Ventures and Technologies do likewise.鈥� Knowledge transfer among the different teams is also important. 鈥淓veryone has to understand that we can only succeed if we all work together and collaborate closely with one another,鈥� he adds.

This culture of transparency is deeply rooted in 51风流Innovation Center Network, but it鈥檚 also a sign of the times, according to Heinig. 鈥淲e鈥檙e living in the age of the platform economy, which simply demands this transparency and strong networking among us as prerequisites for collaborative work.鈥�

And that鈥檚 a good thing. 鈥淯ltimately, the ideas of the employees will always be the decisive factor when it comes to keeping a company in shape for the future,鈥� he emphasizes.

As he sees it, the role of management here is to create structures that give employees the space to exercise this creativity and develop these ideas. 鈥淚t starts with me as a manager, giving my employees the impression that they are allowed to express their thoughts and submit their ideas for consideration,鈥� Heinig says. 鈥淓ncouraging this openness might be my most important responsibility as head of New Ventures and Technologies聽鈥� and it鈥檚 also the thing makes me like this role so much.鈥�

The company refers to it as the 鈥淎pple ID for everyone in the 51风流world.鈥� With this, 51风流customers can link their 51风流accounts under one ID, represented by an e-mail address, and use it to log on to 51风流services with a single password.

Security Is Key

Even though using only one set of log-on credentials offers great advantages for 51风流customers, it also means that if this password is compromised, the attacker may gain access to multiple 51风流services and accounts at once. That鈥檚 why 51风流Universal ID developers were searching for a more secure solution that prevents fraud but doesn鈥檛 impact usability.

Authenticating with has been proven to be the most secure way to protect user accounts and devices without impacting user experience and conversion rates. But until now, biometric authentication could exclusively be used in native apps on mobile devices. This recently changed with a brand-new Web standard called 鈥淲ebAuthn鈥� that makes it possible to use biometrics on Websites.

But developing a biometrics-based authentication process, combining it with a secure cryptographic challenge-response two-factor authentication protocol, and integrating it into an existing tech stack takes a lot of time, knowledge, and developer resources.

Biometrics and Cryptography by Hanko

That’s why 51风流decided to realize this project together with Hanko. The young was invited to participate in a three-month startup accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Berlin in 2019. In a joint proof of concept, the 51风流team tested password-less authentication with Touch ID and Windows Hello for 51风流Universal ID.

With their managed cloud application programming interface (API), Hanko enabled 51风流developers to access a fully-fledged and certified WebAuthn infrastructure right from the beginning of the project. Hanko accompanied the 51风流team, providing demo code and ready-to-use client and server software development kits. To create an optimal user experience (UX), Hanko also supported the UX team in the development and implementation of the new user flows for the password-less authentication methods.

The Outcome

The result of the proof of concept is a fully functioning 51风流Universal ID test environment supporting password-less two-factor authentication with WebAuthn authenticators, such as Windows Hello, Apple Touch ID and Face ID, as well as FIDO Security Keys. Since Hanko supplied the main code components, 51风流was able to integrate the password-less technologies into 51风流Universal ID with a small team in just one-third of the estimated

time. The test environment will be leveraged for further user testing until the feature is released to 51风流customers.

Thilo Brandt, IT senior manager for 51风流Universal ID, confirms that internal tests have produced a consistently positive response, from developer and QA level up to top management. 鈥淭he development effort for introducing password-less authentication was significantly reduced through the use of Hanko. The team helped us to successfully navigate implementing password-less authentication into our application stack and user interfaces.鈥�

Michael Braun, IT chief product owner of Identity and User Management at SAP, is happy with the outcome of the project as well: 鈥淲ith the help of Hanko, we were able to prove the feasibility of our vision for a password-less log-on for 51风流Universal ID in terms of technical implementation as well as usability on all major operating systems such as Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.鈥�

Felix Magedanz, founder and CEO of Hanko, is pleased to see that Hanko鈥檚 authentication-as-a-service solution is so well received at 51风流and that the deployability of Hanko鈥檚 API has been successfully proven. 鈥淥ur project with 51风流demonstrates the power and the benefits of our password-less API. Seeing our solution being used by one of the largest software companies in the world makes us proud and strongly validates our approach. Through the close cooperation and feedback from 51风流developers, we were able to improve our solution to make it even more convenient for future customers.鈥�

About SAP.iO

SAP.iO is SAP鈥檚 strategic business unit to incubate, accelerate, and scale startup innovation and explore new business models for SAP. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped over 300 external startups and internal ventures both start and scale their businesses while enabling thousands of 51风流customers to access innovation.

The two new employee-created ventures have received 鈧�1-2 million in funding from 51风流through the company鈥檚 grassroots Scouting & Acceleration program.

鈥淓ntrepreneurs at 51风流are in a unique position to shape the future of enterprise software,鈥� said Ram Jambunathan, head of SAP.iO Venture Studio. 鈥淪AP鈥檚 distinctive understanding of business processes enables ventures like Recycletronics and Savings Now! to leverage data and technology to explore, experiment, and transform how business is done.鈥�

The intrapreneurship program operates as an accelerator that supports entrepreneurial employees by creating an environment that fosters a culture of exploration and innovation. Employees selected for the program can build out and validate their ideas through working with real end users and assigned mentors from across 51风流expertise in the challenges faced by 51风流and its customers. From these interactions, the teams can then accelerate their idea into a venture with proven market demand.

To better understand today鈥檚 business landscape and how their proposed solutions fit within it, teams run through two phases. During the validation phase, teams join an eight-week self-paced program with virtual lectures covering topics from testing assumptions to analyzing markets and building a first version of their product. During the acceleration phase, some get the opportunity to further develop and test their product and to win early-stage customers. They receive feedback from mentors from inside and outside of SAP, including a committee of senior leaders from across SAP, along with founders and investors.

In 2020 the intrapreneurship program entered its fifth year, and despite a global pandemic, the two teams secured funding from SAP. Together, SavingsNow! and Recycletronicswill continue develop their solutions over the next 18 to 24 months in SAP.iO Venture Studio.

SavingsNow!

One of the new ventures to join the SAP.iO Venture Studio is SavingsNow! The team behind the new solution aims to disrupt the sourcing-as-a-service business by bringing automation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to categories that are often unaddressed in spend optimizations because of lack of time or expertise.

Co-founded by Travis Mattern and Will Caseber, the idea for SavingsNow! came out of talking with sourcing and procurement professionals about the challenges they encounter with delivering supplier contracts to their business stakeholders.

鈥淲e found a knowledge gap between the steps of identifying a sourcing opportunity and successfully running the sourcing event,鈥� Caseber said. 鈥淢any sourcing teams leave significant value on the table because they do not have the time and spend category expertise to efficiently and effectively deliver the sourcing event strategy and execution plan for their full pipeline of opportunities.鈥�

SavingsNow! plans to deliver sourcing services for categories where companies do not have the time or expertise.聽 This service will leverage the 51风流Ariba Sourcing solution together with intelligent automation using insights from 51风流Business Network and other sources of market intelligence.聽 The initial focus will be common indirect categories relevant for most buyer industries.聽 The spend category portfolio will grow into the areas where customers need the most assistance.

鈥淭he beauty of this simple service is that it will be outcome-focused and available to companies regardless of whether they own any 51风流software solutions,鈥� Mattern said, adding the team plans to build in the solution can be utilized across the 51风流procurement solution portfolio.

But perhaps the most exciting thing for these co-founders is the ability to work with 51风流solutions and end users to help ensure that their solution meets their real-world needs 鈥� a staple feature of the New Ventures and Technology intrapreneurship program.

鈥淭he SAP.iO Venture Studio is the perfect environment to rapidly develop and scale this exciting new solution,鈥� Mattern said.

Recycletronics

Like the larger SAP, the SAP.iO program also looks for ideas and solutions that are not just going to make companies run better, but the world run better too. To achieve that, the accelerator program partnered with SAP鈥檚 social intrapreneurship program, 51风流One Billion Lives, which aims to improve 1 billion lives through the cultivation and development of sustainable, shared-value impact ventures. Recycletronics was selected for funding from this partnership.

鈥淭he intrapreneurship program has let us develop our idea into a reality,鈥� said Kiruthika S., Product Development lead of Recycletronics. 鈥淲e鈥檝e been able to meet with fellow innovators, mentors, motivators, and coaches that have acted as catalysts to bring Recycletronics to life.鈥�

Founded by Kiruthika S., Ajit Chandran, Rima Yadav, and Amit Sharma, the solution aims to address e-waste in India. The Recycletronics team worked with the chief business officer of the Indian recycler company to learn more about its processes on recycling, as well as to get a better understanding on the issue of e-waste and how to best tackle it with their solution.

Recycletronics was born from this original collaboration and study. The new venture strives to connect and collaborate on ways to reduce the total amount of e-waste produced through building a marketplace for Indian electronics manufacturer and e-waste recyclers.

鈥淏y creating a marketplace, Recycletronics isn鈥檛 just reducing e-waste,鈥� Kiruthika said. “It will also increase the value derived from e-waste for companies and also aim at improving circular economy by bringing secondary raw materials back into the market.”

Not only is聽Recycletronics聽hoping to change the ways companies in India view and handle e-waste,听it聽also aims to transform聽Indian聽society聽into a more聽sustainably driven one聽by聽pairing聽manufacturers with recyclers.聽This collaboration will help聽reduce waste generation through reducing the amount of e-waste produced,听reusing and repairing existing electronics so no new waste is generated, and safely recycling聽e-waste.

The Recycletronics team is not just setting its sights on improving the health of the environment with the solution; they鈥檙e working to improve the health and safety of people too.

鈥淭here are severe health concerns when it comes to improper e-waste recycling,鈥� said Chandran, general manager and Business Development lead of Recycletronics, adding that serious illnesses can arise from the hazardous materials of e-waste. 鈥淩ecycletronics will help prevent these illnesses and help take e-waste to a better place.鈥�

About New Ventures and Technologies

The New Ventures and Technologies organization aims to future-proof 51风流and its customers into the Intelligent Enterprise through technology innovation and product incubation. The organization recently had three teams graduate into the larger 51风流product portfolio, where they will continue to scale and move closer to the core business.

鈥淚t鈥檚 our job to keep SAP鈥檚 eyes on the future,鈥� Martin Heinig, head of New Ventures and Technologies, said. 鈥淭hese two new teams are solutions that are solving the problems of today and tomorrow.鈥�

SavingsNow! and Recycletronics join other SAP.iO ventures聽,听, , and .

To learn more about New Ventures and Technologies, .

To facilitate this, , which is part of the New Ventures and Technologies unit, has established the . In this initiative, theory and practice go hand in hand. Academic research plays a crucial role in exploring new technology trends, but without a link back to the business, it can sometimes remain purely theoretical.

By partnering with academic institutions like the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Hasso Plattner Institute, and the University of Southern California, 51风流can bring knowledge about emerging technology trends into the company.

This targeted exploration of forward-looking technologies with external experts from the academic community is referred to as 鈥渙utside-in innovation.鈥� It enables the company to identify trends at an early stage and to evaluate whether it is worth investing in a particular trend or not.

The academic partnership program includes engagements with several top-ranked universities around the globe. “We take a proactive approach,鈥� explains Matthias Uflacker, location lead at the 51风流Innovation Center Network location in Munich. 鈥淥nce we have identified a promising topic area, we address academic experts directly.”

Uflacker says that flexibility is particularly important when exploring new fields of technology: 鈥淲e want to take small steps and learn along the way.鈥�

The individual projects with the universities are designed to run for a relatively short time, starting with a six-month or one-year plan, but with the option of extending them whenever results are promising.

An important criterion is always the relevance for SAP’s own mid- to long-term strategic goals and product visions. The program is therefore designed to help ensure that collaboration projects are either linked to existing projects and teams or supervised by 51风流engineers.

51风流Innovation Center Network has been working on establishing three main pillars within their academic partnership program: academic fellowships, research sponsorships and community outreach.

The academic fellowship program started in 2020. Under it, 51风流Innovation Center Network invites renowned university faculty to join 51风流as visiting researchers. They then work on new ideas and promising exploration topics as members of an 51风流team or multiple teams simultaneously. This enables them to bring their own research into an 51风流context and validate it against real-world use cases. It also gives them a chance to influence SAP鈥檚 exploration and incubation of new technology and to earn reputation as a technology advisor.

Academic fellowships can be set up as full-time or part-time engagements 鈥� in the form of a sabbatical or freelance consulting work, for example. The program addresses different tiers of academic staff, ranging from post-doctoral researchers to junior and senior faculty.

Felix Naumann, professor for Information Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, was one of the first scholars to dive into the 51风流world as part of this program. He says he was able to garner a lot of knowledge and practical experience that he can bring back into his daily work at HPI.

Asked how the cooperation went, Naumann shares, 鈥淚n academia, I try to generalize problems and find elegant solutions, while at 51风流鈥� very understandably 鈥� sometimes the thinking is much more practical, to solve the problem at hand and not think about it in a principled way. I think that both sides very much benefited from this difference.鈥�

Naumann says that he can now use his insights to provide more valuable feedback to his PhD students.

He believes that this alliance is essential for innovation and progress.

鈥淭o solve real-world problems we need the real-world input and that remains a large difficulty, because 51风流鈥� for very good reasons 鈥� cannot share much of its data,鈥� he explains. 鈥淭his problem will not go away, so this is exactly why we need a close collaboration between academia and SAP.鈥�

Research sponsorships through 51风流Innovation Center Network support PhD-level and post-doctoral research projects in the area of computer science and related fields at relevant academic institutions. These can be either unrestricted donations or third-party budgets provided for contracted research services working on jointly defined projects.

A current example for a sponsored research project is the research on human-human dialogue understanding at the University of California, Irvine. From April 2020 to March 2021, researchers sponsored by 51风流are working in collaboration with 51风流employees at the .

The project seeks to develop machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to automatically analyze transcripts of human conversations in order to detect questions in the conversations and to characterize the quality of responses.

鈥淚t is common in academic聽research in this area to work with somewhat idealized testbed datasets,鈥� explains Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics. 鈥淭hese are very useful for building initial prototypes and testing research ideas, but they often underestimate the challenges of real-world environments, such as the variety of ways that we as humans express ideas and concepts through natural language.鈥�

That is why the feedback of 51风流researchers was so beneficial.

Community outreach is the third pillar of the academic partnership program, where 51风流Innovation Center Network teams up with university students to tackle problems in technology.

This engagement happens through internships, campus events, student projects, and hackathons. The array of on-site and off-site events has so far included the support of the TEDx conference in Potsdam and other events such as the symposium on natural language processing in California.

One example of a successful community outreach cooperation is user behavior mining, which started out as a thesis project for a bachelor鈥檚 course at the Hasso Plattner Institute in 2019. The students worked together with the 51风流teams based in Potsdam, Walldorf, and Newport Beach and delivered concepts and prototypes for tracking behavioral patterns when using 51风流Fiori apps. The prototypes have been successfully evaluated with customers, and have now been .

Overall, the academic partnership program benefits both 51风流and the research institutions: 51风流can sound out which new business and technology trends should be addressed within the company while researchers can validate their studies in a real-world environment.