Growing the Seeds of Innovation: SAP PartnerEdge and SAP AppHaus Roll Out the Intelligent Enterprise Ambassador Program
SAP´s Intelligent Enterprise (IE) Strategy is meant to be a winning plan for companies to succeed in an agile and ever-changing business environment. Through the SAP PartnerEdge program, SAP drives this strategic goal by providing SAP partners with the right enablement methods and tools, as well as access to SAP software and platforms. This supports them to deploy an ideal framework to their customers and accelerate their transformation journey.
One of the SAP PartnerEdge initiatives is called ‘IE Ambassador Program’, supporting partners to become Ambassadors. In February 2020, a first train-the-trainer pilot workshop took place in the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg, where SAP partners were familiarized with SAP´s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation (HCAI) and the value of Design Thinking to explore and meet customer needs by strictly focusing on end-users. (Read more about the pilot workshop in this previous article).
From Europe to Americas
After holding a successful pilot workshop with European partner representatives, SAP decided to expand the Ambassador Program to also include SAP partners in Latin and North America. Starting with an e-learning course about SAP´s IE Strategy, the partners learned the right soft skills and got an overall introduction to the topic. In the next step, these acquired skills were revised in an online assessment to qualify for the following virtual bootcamp.
Virtual Bootcamp
With more than 230 participants from around 100 of SAP’s partner organizations, the virtual bootcamp consisted of one session each for partners in the European, North American and Latin American region. These sessions took place in April and March 2020, led by instructors with the focus on what is necessary to successfully assist customers in becoming intelligent enterprises.
Customer Centricity Is Key to Success
The bootcamp sessions were supported by the global SAP AppHaus team within SAP Customer Innovation: George Stafford, User Experience Design Expert at the SAP AppHaus in New York, and Tobias Gollwitzer, Customer Design Engagement Lead at the SAP AppHaus in Heidelberg, presented the SAP AppHaus Network to all attendees. They also provided insights into SAP’s Human-Centered-Approach to Innovation as a method to co-innovate with customers, putting the strict focus on the end-consumer. As a pragmatic set of tools, they introduced the award-winning Innovation Toolkit for Virtual Collaboration to the partner audience, that their team had developed in response to the COVID-19 lockdown. The toolkit provides users with available online material, templates and methodologies to drive innovation even from the comfort of one’s home office. The feedback collected during the session showed that the partners were particularly impressed by the human-centered approach as opposed to tackling customer projects with a technology-driven proof of concept (PoC).
“The Human-Centered Approach to Innovation can be a valuable asset when applied to solution architecture and issues concerning the Intelligent Enterprise!”
Lutz Nitsche & Christian Weber, SAP PartnerEdge members
Final Step to Trusted Ambassadors
After attending the bootcamp, the IE Partner Ambassadors got the chance to revise and apply what they learned by pitching a customer project where they applied the HCAI to a jury of SAP experts. After the evaluation, the best innovative customer solution was awarded with a place on stage in a regional SAP partner conference.
The Intelligent Enterprise Ambassador Program Fosters Innovation
By running innovation workshops, partners can now support and enable their customers on their business transformation journey. The central message of all workshops: Keep humans in the center of all business processes. With this guiding principle in mind, and the right tools and methodologies on hand, SAP`s trusted partners can now better assist their customers to become truly intelligent enterprises.
To learn more about the Human-Centered Approach to Innovation and other AppHaus offerings feel free to contact Tobias Gollwitzer (tobias.gollwitzer@sap.com) or George Stafford (george.stafford@sap.com).
Written by Maike Krieg and Julia Jakob
