An Interview with SAP’s Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jürgen Müller
Earlier October, Lition’s Chief Operations Officer Dr. Kyung-Hun Ha and SAP’s Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jürgen Müller met at Berlin’s SAP Data Space to talk about the future of blockchain, as well as their future partnership in this exciting market.
Video 1 :
Kyung: Can you tell me a little bit about this place? Why did you choose this location?
Jürgen: It’s a public space — the SAP Data space (serving as) outreach into the Berlin community. (We’ve) created a great space here, where SAP and others can have events. So Lition, for example… Today you can can have an event here and we can shoot this video.
Kyung: The community is obviously interested in getting to know you, so tell us a little bit more about your role as Chief Innovation Officer at SAP.
Jürgen: My Boss, CEO at SAP, Mr.Bill McDermott… made it very simple. I only have one task: To make sure that SAP does not fall behind on any kind of innovation waves that are coming, but on the other side, we lead the way for our customers because they expect guidance from us when it comes to innovation topics around enterprise application.
Kyung: That sounds very interesting.
Jürgen: And (my) days are (all) very, very different. So (there are) a lot of customer interactions, of course. A lot of internal interactions with our teams. And then we have, of course, a lot going on with all the technology trends but (we’re) also talking to partners, to customers. We created an internal innovation round-table. So I asked our board members… to nominate innovation ambassadors… We now have a very, very strong innovation community with SAP, and… we have an external innovation round-table where we meet with futurists, with professors, and forward thinkers in the industry… to discuss innovation topics.
Kyung: So externally you get feedback from from your partners, from research, etc. But how do you make sure that you that you really get all the information, and that you make sure that you… prioritize the information, and use it for your day to day business?
Jürgen: That is the work… when we talk about technologies of the Innovation Center networks.
So you can imagine that there’s a huge funnel of information coming in and potential ideas coming in, and then you have to select… We have a process in place of how to do it. So first there’s exploration: You invest a small amount of time there. Then you ideate and try to create product ideas, then you validate those with customers, and then the funnel gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Then once you pivot a lot and curate a lot and you find your sweet spot, then it is very, very interesting. And then you can scale massively and have great, great success.
Kyung: What do you think particularly are the challenges for startups especially in this innovation field?
Jürgen: Finding the right product market fit… I think this is the largest challenge. Because if you don’t have it and you push too hard, you don’t know where you are going. If you have it, then it’s an execution risk, so then you need experienced leaders and experienced people in the company who know their domain. And then the likelihood of success is very, very high.
Kyung: So SAP is basically assisting them (i.e. startups) as well, right? On these decision-making processes.
Jürgen: Yes , so we we do bring startups into our ecosystem… for example, when we work with the SAP.IO. There we help them, bring them together with our experts… So they appreciate that a lot.
Kyung: We basically talked already about innovation but what’s the meaning of innovation for you?
Jürgen: Very important is this: It’s invention. So coming up with something new. Plus adoption.
So very often innovation stops at invention and then people are happy and already satisfied. That might be good enough in research because you might have discovered something new and probably later on someone else can use it. But if you want to drive commercial innovation, it is invention plus adoption.
Kyung: Thank you!
Video 2:
In this video, Lition’s Chief Operations Officer Dr. Kyung-Hun Ha and SAP’s Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jürgen Müller dive into blockchain and how we can all benefit from it.
Kyung: SAP is focusing on different technological streams, as you mentioned already. What are the advantages of blockchain technology?
Jürgen: So SAP, to start with, is a leader in central ledger technology. So this is many, many customers: More than 350,000 customers run on SAP systems, and that’s their central ledger… Blockchain brings the opportunity of having a distributed ledger. So potentially all use cases or business scenarios — where you have multiple parties involved, and middlemen involved, and a lot of negotiation is happening, and reconciliation is happening — the potential is there that these use cases get disrupted (by) shared data ownership. (You have) more efficiency, more transparency… So that’s why, of course, (blockchain) is a very, very interesting topic, whereas of course not all challenges are solved. And that’s why… the technical expertise has to be there in order to make blockchain use cases happen.
Kyung: In which industries do you think the most tangible benefits can be achieved with respect to blockchain technology?
Jürgen: I do see that in industries like… track and trace… So where do you need that? You need it in the farm to fork use case… if you want to verify where is food coming from… Has it been contaminated? Maybe if you add other sensors — like have temperature boundaries been exceeded, were there any anomalies? Or similarly in the pharma supply chain… (are the) pharmaceuticals genuine? Are they counterfeit?
So to have these kinds of proofs… what I do see is that many consortia are being formed, where complete value chains; for example, with regard to transportation or with energy production come together in a permissioned blockchain to actually share data, and leverage these potential efficiencies.
Kyung: So as you know there are many blockchain projects out there. From your perspective, what are the downsides of current blockchain technologies ?
Jürgen: You do see scalability challenges in the public blockchain. You do see energy consumption challenges, you do you see transaction costs. Also, of course, you want to have immutability… this all should stay.
But you want to have some of these restrictions. So… most of the use cases are in permissioned blockchains. So people come together. And actually it’s… not only about technology, but you do bring together a whole value chain, you do bring together partners, and they also change how they work together. And maybe even complete business models (will change): If intermediaries do not exist anymore, … that work… somehow has to be done by someone else… So this is, I think, even the larger challenge than the pure technical challenge.
Kyung: You already mentioned permissioned and permissionless blockchain technologies. So what do you think are the benefits of public/private deletable blockchain infrastructure?
Jürgen: Yeah, so in some cases it will be sufficient to have… private blockchain. So if you have, for example, a clear owner of an asset, then you don’t have all the benefits of blockchain, certainly. Then if you want…to do that through a blockchain use case in a broader user community…then how do you verify this in the public domain? You cannot.
And this is also where, in the moment, we don’t see any use cases that are currently applied beyond… cryptocurrency. But if you want to have use cases, for example, in the energy market, (or) in another mass-market: consumer products or even pharmaceuticals, you need to have this. So therefore you need to be able… to have private (but then) bring it to a permissioned blockchain, and then… verify this in a public blockchain. And this is very, very interesting to push blockchain and consensus protocols in this direction.
Kyung: So you mentioned that SAP is working as an incubator, as well, and has a lot of partnerships. So what kind of partnership is SAP basically looking for, and how do you think SAP can really benefit from those corporations and partnerships?
Jürgen: SAP is the market-leader enterprise space. And the vision is to help make the world run better and improve people’s lives, so therefore I’m very much looking forward to the partnership that SAP and Lition have set up.
Lition is beyond thrilled to partner with #SAP, and we look forward to building a transparent, multifaceted, impactful blockchain community together.
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