Corporate Innovation Management: Board Level Commitment Necessary

As I noted in my recent article SaaS Companies: You Have an Unprecedented Opportunity, there is an amazing level of potential for corporate innovation in the current environment, both internal and external.

Look Within

Any company that has built a substantial business in any software category has core competency within its folds. It has highly capable engineers who have developed some degree of domain knowledge in their sphere. It has product managers who are in touch with customers. It has sales engineers who are in regular and even closer touch with customers. It has sales people who know the customers and the competition well.

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 1)

This interview focuses on the Corporate Innovation strategy of a major advertising agency as it navigates the challenges of a rapidly changing consumer engagement landscape.

Sramana Mitra: As an introduction, tell us a bit about your focus, philosophy, or overall thinking at TBWA/Chiat/Day these days vis-a-vis innovation.

John Deschner: I have an interesting role that was purposely designed to be both an innovation role and a more central traditional role in the agency. I’m both the Chief Innovation Officer and Managing Director. For most large creative agencies, >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of areas of interest for these kinds of seed investments, what degree of relevance do you need with SAP’s current technology? Does it need to be built on HANA? Does it need to be built on something else within the SAP stack? What are the constraints?

Max Wessel: There are no constraints from an underlying technology perspective. Obviously, we would love for everybody in the world to build on HANA and on SAP cloud platform, but we also understand that there are plenty of viable open source components and cloud infrastructure providers that startups want to work with. Instead of requiring that technical definition >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Our model is actually complete customer immersion. It’s a one-year program. Each person who gets to be part of the program has one year including side-by-side methodology training, customer immersion, customer validation, and TAM analysis. It’s not in vacuum at all. I’m sure your program is effective. I’m just comparing notes. That’s the whole point of these discussions – to understand the different processes that are working.

Let’s switch gears and talk about your external innovation methodology. When SAP launched HANA we 

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the team comes forward, is it required to present a business case analysis or a hackathon style development first?

Max Wessel: They tend to do a very light back-of-the-envelope business case – nothing substantive. We teach people to think by analogy. If you’re building a tool to get into the recruitment services market or start to automate what recruiters would otherwise do for a large organization, the question is, “What’s the scope of the businesses that have been launched like that before?”

You don’t have to develop an in-depth business plan but you have to have some conviction. We hope that you have some >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 2)

Max Wessel: From an intrapreneurship perspective, we have a program that we’ve been running for close to four years now. We have all sorts of ideation programs around the company for decades but four and a half years ago, we launched a program that’s aptly called Intrapreneurship.

At one point, we kicked off the campaign. That campaign started locally. We have a network of venture labs that operate in actual physical locations. SAP has development centers around the globe. Those labs will come to the employee base and will give them a series of challenges. They’ll say, “Here are the topics that are most interesting to us.” These could be cutting energy utilization >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 1)

This interview explores the nuances of SAP’s Corporate Incubation strategy in great depth.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about what SAP’s thinking is in the domain of corporate innovation. What are your goals, activities, strategies and structure? Let’s dig into the programs.

Max Wessel: Let me start off with the high level description of what SAP is for those who are not familiar with the organization. SAP is Europe’s largest software company. We also happen to be the largest enterprise applications business in >>>

222nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With John Deschner, TBWA\Chiat\Day, On Corporate Innovation

John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer\Managing Director at TBWA\Chiat\Day discusses the Corporate Innovation strategy of his advertising agency.

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