Sowing the Seeds of Innovation:
SAP PartnerEdge Train-the-Trainer Workshop at the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg
In today’s fast-moving world, an innovative and open mindset are key to success. The SAP PartnerEdge program provides SAP partners with the right enablement methods and tools, as well as access to SAP software and platforms. On February 4, 2020, the SAP AppHaus team welcomed representatives of 21 SAP partners from various industries and four colleagues from SAP’s PartnerEdge team to a three-day workshop on the Human-Centered Approach to Innovation. The enablement was set up as a train-the-trainer workshop. That way the participants can take this methodology into the partner organizations and multiply it across the SAP partner and customer network.
Six SAP AppHaus coaches guided the trainees through the workshop, exploring each step of the innovation process, see central graphic below:
Day 1: Introduction with a Focus on Exploring and Discovering
Attendees got an introduction to Design Thinking and the Human-Centered Approach to Innovation, with a focus on its business value and how the strategy has been applied to customer projects in the past. In the “Explore” and “Discover” phases, participants learned that the first steps clearly focus on the users: how they do something, and what are their pain points. Through this research you can elaborate and formulate the problem to be solved. By the end of the first day, the audience received a design challenge to gain real experience with the methodology and apply it in the following days.
Day 2: From User Research to Designing Ideas for Solutions
The workshop audience learned how to do user interviews and get valuable insights and how to evaluate the information gathered in the user research. In the following “Design” phase the participants had the chance to learn how to produce as many ideas for solutions as possible. Among the ideas gathered they selected the best impulses to transform them into visions on how to solve the initial problem.
Day 3: Prototyping with Scenes Storyboarding to Validate Ideas
The scholars mapped their ideas noted down the day before to create a storyline that shows, how potential target users would apply the selected solutions in a certain scenario. In doing so, the attendees got to know the storyboarding tool Scenes, developed by the SAP AppHaus as part of the Innovation Culture Toolkit. It is a great means to create scenarios that reflect user research insights and to validate new ideas in a playful way.
In customer projects, this process phase would be followed by the “Deliver” phase where the previously created prototypes are put into action and tested with the customer. The workshop, however, focused on the journey from idea to prototype.
To ensure further support for the partners to apply what they learned, the organizers created an SAP Jam page for all participants. This is an opportunity for further collaboration and exchange. That way, the workshop participants can stay in touch and get continued support from the SAP team after the event.
SAP PartnerEdge members Lutz Nitsche and Christian Weber closed the workshop with a clear statement: “The Human-Centered Approach to Innovation can be a valuable asset when applied to solution architecture and issues concerning the Intelligent Enterprise!”
With this enablement workshop, the SAP PartnerEdge and SAP AppHaus teams jointly took an important step to help adopt the Human-Centered Approach to Innovation further. It will significantly increase the value of services and support offered to clients in all innovation-related areas. And in doing so, the partner network underlines the positioning of SAP as innovation partner of choice.
by Imke Vierjahn and Julia Jakob
