In the latest episode of our Femventures Podcast we spoke with Tonja Erismann about her experiences as an innovation leader at SAP. Learn how diverse teams are an essential part of generating innovation.
Femventures is a podcast by SAP.iO that brings you stories of women who are currently shaping the future of the tech industry. You hear from women at SAP who are the heads of innovation departments, founded their own business or are running start-up accelerators inside the company. Hosts Lisa Labath and Leonie Fremgen put a spotlight on their experiences in a male-dominated field and invite you to listen to them as they talk about overcoming challenges, taking risks and embracing failure.
This show is an opportunity for people looking for actionable advice and inspiring female role models working in tech.
OVERVIEW
In the third episode of Femventures, we meet Tonja Erismann, who currently heads the Global Head of Venture Strategy & Design at SAP. She and her team scout for relevant trends and future customer challenges to create and a pipeline of venture ideas, in order to incubate and grow them to deliver substantive commercial impact. She is responsible for a +€500m portfolio of new ventures.
Tonja is not one to easily get bored, and her interests lie far broader than just tech. She studied mathematics and linguistics, is currently getting a degree in interior design on the side and has a passion for architecture. Just as much as cultivating diversity in her own life, she passionately believes that empathy and diversity within teams are essential to generate innovation.
In this episode, we get inspired by Tonja’s contagious optimism. We discover that creating something new has a pivotal role in her career and that she always forms teams centered around empathy.
THEMATICS
What to listen for in this episode of Femventures:
- Rather than encouraging more girls and women to consider a career in tech, we should be encouraging people in general to do what they’re passionate about. That could mean anything from more men working in childcare or working part-time, just as much as encouraging women to consider tech. Tonja argues this could be less about individuals accepting each other and being resilient in their choices, rather than it being a purely systemic change
- Apart from situations where gender has negatively affected the way women are treated or perceived, there’s also advantages in being a woman in the tech industry. Even though tech industry is largely male dominated, it generally is a world that requires a mindset that is very apt to accept change at high speed and might therefore be an environment with people that are generally more accepting of other types of changes too.
3 reasons why diversity is essential to innovation:
- Diverse backgrounds (be it age, gender, culture, religion, beliefs, values, or others) create a broader pool for creativity, which is exactly what sparks innovation. The more you expose yourself to differences, the more likely those sparks are bound to happen.
- Having a diverse team only works if you bring on a certain flexibility and empathy on the job (it means that you don’t care what someone looks like, eat, pray or work) — and innovation itself also means empathy; because you need to understand someone else’s challenges and care enough about it to want to solve it and create value for everyone involved. So, empathy is a huge driver for innovation on the one hand, and at the same time a necessity for a diverse team to function — so that’s where the 2 come together.
- Each phase in the innovation process requires a different type of skillset, which means you need a unique blend of people and skillset to make innovation happen (e.g. generating, conceptualizing, optimizing, implementing).
3 practical tips for building a diverse team:
- Instead of one extreme of tokenism and other extreme of choosing a candidate regardless of race and gender, its’ about doing them both, but at different times in the process. Represented the underrepresented at the beginning of the process to have a good pool of candidates, to then promote the best person for the job no matter what their background is. It might be less about the balance in the end, and more about bringing balance to the initial part of the hiring process.
- Create an environment where people feel comfortable no matter what their background is, by actively giving them the flexibility to make the job work for their specific situation. Communicate openly about personal or family needs and ask your team to do the same.
- Promote existing organizational resources and promote them in your team, e.g. SAP Coaching programs or leadership trainings.
Listen to snippets here — or listen to the entire episode and more on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast app of choice.
LINKS:
- Harvard Business Review: Newsletter, Blog
- Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter- by Liz Wiseman
- Radical Candor — by Kim Scott
- TEDxStanford: 5 steps to designing the life you want — by Bill Burnett
- The Basadur Profile
About SAP.iO
SAP.iO is SAP’s strategic business unit to incubate, accelerate and scale startup innovation and explore new business models for SAP. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 300+ external startups and internal ventures both start and scale their businesses while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation.
