MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Hasso Plattner Institute, and the University of Southern California are some of the academic institutions that SAP partners with in pursuit of new trending technology and innovations.
SAP Innovation Center Network, known as the home of innovation for SAP, is the software giant’s avenue to connect with the academia and other research institutions, enabling the company to keep a close eye on the latest or budding technology trends starting from a research standpoint.
As part of the New Ventures and Technologies unit, SAP Innovation Center Network has established the academic partnership program to ensure that academic researches remain viable and applicable to the real world of business. Some successful products of the New Ventures and Technologies that have recently graduated into the larger SAP product portfolio are SAP Ruum, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, and the Spotlight by SAP solution.
Eyeing the New Trending Technology
SAP’s partnership with several top-ranked universities around the globe, including MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Hasso Plattner Institute, and the University of Southern California, is an example of an “outside-in innovation”, which is a targeted exploration of forward-looking technologies supported by academic experts. By engaging in projects early on, companies can evaluate and identify new trending technology that is worth venturing into.
Matthias Uflacker, location lead at the SAP Innovation Center Network location in Munich said:
“We take a proactive approach. Once we have identified a promising topic area, we address academic experts directly.”
The academic partnership program encourages university researches to translate into an SAP context, even on an SAP scale. Designed to help ensure that collaboration projects are either linked to existing projects and teams or supervised by SAP engineers, the program’s important criterion is the relevance for SAP’s own mid-to-long-term strategic goals and product visions. The academic partners are embedded into the innovation process and enabled to inspire, explore, and validate their ideas in close partnership with SAP’s engineering teams and domain leads.
The individual projects with the universities may start with a six-month or one-year plan, with a chance of extension when a plausible development is observed.
Engagement Models
Participants of the program may find the best-suited engagement model that matches their lifestyle, passion, and ambition. The three main pillars within the SAP Innovation Center Network academic partnership program are:
Academic Fellowship Program
This program best suits different tiers of academic staff, ranging from post-doctoral researchers to junior and senior faculty, who are looking for transferring cutting-edge research into scalable solutions. Academic fellowships can be set up as full-time or part-time engagements – in the form of a sabbatical or freelance consulting work.
One of the first scholars who became part of the program is Felix Naumann, Professor for Information Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. Sharing about his experience, he said:
“In academia, I try to generalize problems and find elegant solutions, while at SAP — very understandably — 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.”
Research Sponsorships
This program supports PhD-level and post-doctoral research projects at world-class academic institutions, labs, and research groups working in technical areas that are of key interest to SAP. Sponsorships are typically awarded to principal investigators and are used to fund Ph.D. candidates or post-doctoral researchers to work on a research project for up to three years at university.
Community outreach
This program enables the SAP Innovation Center Network to team up with university students to tackle challenging problems in technology. Engagements include cross-disciplinary internships and the support of campus events, student projects, and hackathons. These on-site and off-site events have included the support of the TEDx conference in Potsdam.
SAP Innovation Center Network has multi-disciplinary teams from several locations worldwide– Potsdam, Nanjing, Mougins, Palo Alto, Walldorf, Bangalore, Newport Beach, Karlsruhe, and Munich.
