5 Social Startup Ideas From SAP’s ‘One Billion Lives’ Initiative
SAP held its annual “One Billion Lives” Demo Day at the company’s NYC Hudson Yards location last week. A team that is focused on fixing improper food labeling was crowned the winner of the social innovation-focused event.
Trying to improve 1 billion people’s lives may seem like a lofty or unrealistic goal for any mere business to pursue, but large technology companies like SAP are investing in these types of social efforts to keep employees engaged and perhaps even better the world. Example: SAP held its annual “One Billion Lives” (1BL) Demo Day event at the company’s Hudson Yards headquarters in New York City last Thursday. The event was part of SAP’s 1BL social entrepreneurship initiative, which is focused on driving innovation and social impact with the goal of tangibly improving the lives of 1 billion people.
The 1BL event pitted five teams against each other, with a chance to compete in the final competition that will be held in Potsdam, Germany. The competing teams were composed of SAP employees who are seeking funding to develop their startup ventures. The teams made pitches that involved solving business problems by using tech like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.
In a “ Shark Tank”-style format, the contestants’ pitches lasted approximately five minutes, followed by feedback from a judging panel of SAP C-suite leaders from multiple business units. The panel in NYC included Thack Brown, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for SAP North America; Brigette McInnis-Day, COO for SAP SuccessFactors; Kirsten Sutton, Vice President and Managing Editor of SAP Labs Canada; Eric Stine, Chief Innovation Officer for SAP North America; and Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for SAP.
Startup ventures that participate in the 1BL initiative use SAP’s technologies, especially the company’s flagship SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA database service. The competition launched in the company’s Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) division in 2016 and expanded globally in 2018. Each year five teams participate in each region. In addition to the NYC event, 1BL events took place in Asia, Latin America, London, and other areas last week. The winning team in Brazil was called Xpecial; its goal is to help people with autism.
When SAP employees participate in 1BL, they have access to a program called SAP iO, which provides a network of coaches and mentors and offers funding for social impact ventures. The team members act like entrepreneurs, but the company calls them “intrapreneurs” because they’re fostering innovation internally at SAP. They work with a combination of entrepreneurs, venture capitals (VCs), and SAP customers to develop their startup projects. SAP would like to see projects advance from the creation of a business model to incubation and pilot to a fully developed venture.
“What we’re doing with 1BL is directly aligned with our innovation agenda and business strategy at SAP,” Deb Kaplan, Program Director for 1BL and an Executive Board Member at SAP, told PCMag. “We’ve leveraged the company core assets for good, and that’s not only our technology but obviously our people and even our value chain. Overall, we have a two-pronged approach, so internally, we are driving entrepreneurship and fostering innovation.”
Food-Tracing Venture Wins the NYC Event
The winning team at the July 19 event was called “No Squid.” It was an attempt by Kathleen Chiu, Solutions Advisor for Analytics at SAP, and Zaid Rasid, Blockchain Design Consultant on the ATI-Blockchain team at SAP, to prevent fraud in the food industry through tracing in the supply chain. “The current problem is that we really don’t have visibility or transparency into our supply chain to really know that what we’re eating is authentic food,” Chiu said.
The amount of fraud and mislabeling of fish and seafood in the food industry led the No Squid team to tackle that area for their project. Chiu noted that, because white tuna looks similar to escolar fish, it’s often mislabeled. This error is dangerous due to toxins in escolar that can cause digestive issues, Chiu noted.
“What the missing piece of the puzzle really is, is the actual authenticity of the fish,” Chiu said. “For example, you’re able to track the fish from point A to point B, but what if from point A the fish was already the wrong type of fish? Then, essentially, you’re not able to uncover whether or not the fish is fraudulent or not.”
Tracing Food Using the Cloud or Blockchain
Chiu and Rasid may consider blockchain to trace food in the supply chain, but right now it’s thinking about a cloud platform, Rasid said. “A blockchain is something that we could always look at down the horizon if we want to create more of a distributed system and have more transparency with more partners,” Rasid said. “At the present moment, from a technology standpoint, we’re thinking SAP Cloud Platform.”
The first step will be exploring how to house and distribute the data for tracing the food, Chiu said. The process will involve DNA verification for the fish, and the No Squid team is looking for a partner to work with on that aspect.
“What we’re trying to do first is just get the data into our systems and … house the data,” Chiu said. “How we leverage the data, how we distribute the data, is something that we are still going to be thinking over and [adjusting] as we progress.”
Why ‘No Squid’ Won
The No Squid team won because of the potential for social impact in the food industry, according to Kirsten Sutton, Managing Director for SAP Labs Canada, and a judge at the 1BL event. Sutton said that No Squid also met the three main criteria: team, traction, and opportunity. The team criteria consisted of a shared passion and commitment. Traction factored in how far the team had gone in gaining validation for their solution with the community and noting any gaps in which they would need to work with partnerships. For opportunity, the judges focused on the social impact of the pitch and whether there was financial and social value.
“It was clear that their idea had the potential to impact everyone on the planet given they could scale across all food types,” Sutton said. “Along with this immeasurable social impact, the pitch showed several channels to market that leveraged SAP’s ecosystem as well as carried the potential for strong financial gains. Also, this is something that can scale across the world and prevent serious tragedies with allergies, sickness, and, at worst, death.”
A Breakdown of the Competition
1. The “AI for Good” Team: This team is looking to develop intelligent image sensing to better inform first responders to natural disasters. It was led by Alysaa Co, an intern on the SAP Canada Sales Value Advisory team, which assesses the value of software for businesses, and Alan Tan, Senior Director of Intelligent Technology Digital Transformation Services, North America, at SAP. They would use AI and computer vision to analyze aerial images of a disaster scene to get aid to people in need. Geospatial information systems would also help to identify which roads are blocked for first responders.
“Essentially what ‘AI for Good’ does is, we take photo and aerial video imaging of a disaster zone after the disaster occurs, and then we are able to use AI technology to tag almost what the scenario is,” Co told PCMag. “So, if there’s a road that’s been submerged or if there’s a building that’s collapsed, then identifying that on a map shows first responders places to avoid or the best routes to take.”
Co said the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China was an impetus for developing the AI for Good project because, when roads were submerged, trucks carrying food and water could not reach a village where the earthquake hit.
2. The “Saving Lives” Team: This team consisted of Ian McAlpine, SAP Group Product Specialist and a member of the company’s BI & Analytics Competence Center, and Radim Bacinschi, who works in the SAP BI and Analytics Competence Center. It involves using an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled device, a simple display, a temperature sensor, and a speaker to develop smart emergency exit signs and updates on the status of fires using system built on SAP HANA Service. These smart signs will “provide a safe evacuation path for everyone in the building,” McAlpine said in his presentation.
3. The “Protecting the Forests” Team: This team consisted of Thomas Arends, Innovation Manager with the Applied Business Innovation team as part of SAP DBS Innovation Services and Solutions, and Christian Butzlaff, Head of the SAP Value Prototyping Americas Solution Engineering team. In their presentation, they described how they want to build a traceability solution for timber from the farm to the consumer. The goal of the solution is to fight deforestation. To do that, they would use SAP’s Ariba supply chain platform and SAP Leonardo, a suite of analytics, blockchain, data intelligence, IoT, and machine learning (ML) products.
“What we want to do is provide a global platform for sustainable forest management, increase certification by providing a digitized system, [give] incentives for certifying farmers, and [provide] easy access to certification resources,” Butzlaff said in his presentation. “We want an increase in credibility by having an end-to-end digital seal for traceability, and…bringing everything into the Ariba Network.”
4. The “Improving Outcomes for Children in Foster Care” Team: This team consisted of Kimberly Cohen, SAP’s Director of Demand Generation-South, and Bina Goleminova, a member of SAP’s Customer First-Enterprise Success team. They’re focused on digitizing foster care. The project will use ML to detect and mitigate risks for children in foster care. ML would become a virtual assistant for social workers as they help children in foster care, Cohen said.
Following the 1BL competition, teams will continue to receive mentoring from the judges, and No Squid, NYC’s winning team, will advance to the Accelerator round. In that round, they will receive coaching and mentoring to prepare for the final competition in Potsdam, Germany. In Potsdam, eight winners will be chosen, and SAP will fund them as either a full venture or a proof of concept, depending on their stage of development, Kaplan said.
Through incubators like 1BL, SAP aims to help solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges, like misidentified foods and inadequate foster care, by drawing on technology like ML and cloud computing. Hopefully more large tech vendors will develop similar programs to solve humanitarian problems and do social good.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on July 25, 2019.
