Clamoring for Innovation Ideas Using SAP HANA at HANA 2014

Cross posted at the blog at SAPHANA.com…

As I leave the HANA 2014 conference in Orlando this week, I am simply impressed with the enthusiasm I felt from a room full of enterprise architects looking for ways to support innovation for their companies with SAP HANA.

When I was asked to present at SAP Insider’s HANA 2014 Conference in Orlando about business innovation as it relates to SAP HANA, one of my favorite topics, I jumped at the opportunity.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a room full of eager attendees waiting for me at my 8:30AM session this morning.

I always start by asking a few questions to get to know my audience. At HANA 2014 for both my sessions the audience responded as follows to my unscientific poll:

•          50% work for SAP customers
•          50% are consultants serving SAP customers

•          25% are working for customers that already have or are actively considering  purchasing SAP HANA

•          Less than 25% were business analysts concerned with software requirements
•          75% said they are Enterprise Architects
•          A smattering, around 5%, said they are developers

As I said, the poll was unscientific and audience members did answer multiple times in the poll choices.

You can get an idea of the perspective and interest of the people attending a session about building innovative custom applications on SAP HANA. They were not developers, but they were very interested in hearing about how they could support developers in creating innovative applications on SAP HANA.

While it’s not my intention to recreate my session in blog form, I have some interesting takeaways for myself as a result of interactions with the attendees in my sessions.  Check out the slides of my presentation on  Slideshare.

 

1.  When it comes to fostering a “culture of invention” 90% of my attendees companies appear not to partake in more forward looking approaches such as holding company Hackathons or cross functional innovation days with employees. Nor do many of them partake in crowd sourcing programs such as Kaggle, or check out SAP’s crowd sourcing program for SAP HANA customers: SAP Idea Incubator.

2.  Audience members appreciated my “3 Questions to know if you have a SAP HANA Application” slide. Many of their questions were related to geospatial data capabilities of SAP HANA and predictive analytics functionality.

 

 

[SOURCE: © SAP, used with permission] Three questions for determining if your custom application might be suitable for developing on SAP HANA.

Open Innovation Crowdsourcing at SAP Idea Incubator

Previously posted by me for the blog at SAPHANA.com.

We have just unveiled a new kind of crowd sourcing campaign on SAP Idea Incubator – “Open Ideas” which feature completely open business cases, data sets, and results.

Our first project in this category, “Help Build an Open Source Administrative Tool for SAP HANA” (login required) exactly fits this definition. Proposed by IBM Global Services, they ask the following from the SAP HANA community:

1. Create a tool to improve administration of SAP HANA
2. Sample data model will be shared for all participants
3. Winning solution will be asked to contribute their solution into an open source project.

Here is a short demonstration of what the proposer is looking for with this idea:

 

Who Are You Calling an Industrialist, Mr. Seth Godin?

The other day, renowned author and blogger Seth Godin posted his blog “Industrialists are not Capitalists.” He made a point that “capitalists”, as he calls them, are the innovators, and industrialists are the optimizers, realizing efficiency and more profit out of industries created by the capitalists.

Is building a better mousetrap an innovation or an optimization?

[SOURCE: © June Campbell, used according to Creative Commons License]

How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

My latest article for download: How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

Or see in the online version of SAP Insider.

Three Obvious, Frequently Forgotten Axioms of Business Innovation

Cross posted from SAP on the Cloud

Innovation has become one of the most overused words in the corporate-speak lexicon. In fact, many of us have stopped understanding what it really means. Being in the IT industry or trade, you probably receive promotional content from enterprise tech companies with exciting headlines such as “Achieve Business Innovation Now!” It might seem that marketers are grasping for new adjectives to modify the world innovation to make it more impactful, but business innovation has an important meaning that many executives, product engineers, and IT folks don’t pay enough attention to in their work.

Business innovation is adding new unique abilities to a company’s business practices to deliver competitively differentiating value to customers. What follows are three obvious axioms for achieving business innovation that people often fail to remember.