Despite the obstacles of the COVID-19 pandemic and out of more than 700 submissions, SAP has been awarded four German Innovation Awards.
Under SAP Executive Board Member and Chief Technology Officer Juergen Mueller, SAP AppHaus has been honored with the 2020 German Innovation Gold Award and the 2020 German Innovation Winner Award for its Innovation Culture Toolkit and healthcare project OP 4.1.
The Innovation Culture Toolkit, applied in hundreds of customer engagements, comprises the methodological resources created and applied by SAP AppHaus to collaboratively drive innovation. The OP 4.1 project developed a prototype of an intelligent platform for the operating room of the future.
In addition, SAP AppHaus Network partner Bourne Digital, with customer Taronga Conservation Society Australia, received an honorable mention in the 2020 SAP Innovation Awards for an intuitive app based on SAP Cloud Platform that supports zookeepers in the field.
“The awards underscore the strength of SAP’s holistic approach with a clear technology strategy tailored to the needs of today’s intelligent enterprises,” said Anja Schneider, senior vice president and global head of Customer Innovation, Technology, and Innovation at SAP. “The Business Technology Platform, complemented with our innovation approach that combines design thinking and enterprise architecture, is the foundation for successful innovation and transformation.”
SAP AppHaus In a Nutshell
By applying human-centered and iterative methodologies, SAP AppHaus brings the principle of innovating with customers to the next level. Using the right human-centered methods and powerful technologies, such as the Business Technology Platform, can help to effectively drive sustainable business innovation by:
- pinpointing high-value areas for business process transformation,
- identifying new business opportunities that are aligned with a strategic direction, and
- combining experience and operational data.
Culture Matters: The Innovation Culture Toolkit
The Innovation Culture Toolkit received the German Innovation Gold Award for “Excellence in B2B Office Solutions” and a German Innovation Winner Award for “Design Thinking.”
According to Lutz Dietzold, managing director of the German Design Council, “The Innovation Culture Toolkit is a one-of-a-kind collection of proven methods and tools for companies that want to establish a culture of innovation.”
It’s a mantra: Companies need to innovate and transform to sustain their business and become intelligent enterprises. Besides technology, culture proves to be a big hurdle for digital transformation and innovation. SAP AppHaus addresses this challenge by transforming organizations along the framework of five key innovation enablers: people, process, place, leadership, and technology.
The Innovation Culture Toolkit offers a variety of unique methods and resources for each key innovation enabler, empowering organizations to apply this framework and jump-start their innovation journeys on their own. For the key innovation enabler “process,” for example, the provided toolkit resources aim to guide organizations through each phase of SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation. One of these toolkit resources is SCENES, a storyboarding and prototyping tool meant to create fun, illustrative stories that show the value of early ideas and product visions.
Even in times of COVID-19, the potential of the toolkit can be fully exploited, for it is now available virtually. The mission of SAP AppHaus is to continue driving sustainable innovation by virtualizing offerings.
OP 4.1: Intelligent Platform for the Operating Room of the Future
The OP 4.1 project won the prestigious German Innovation Gold Award for “Design Thinking” and the German Innovation Winner Award for “B2B Medical Technologies.”
“SAP’s OP 4.1 prototype shows how a platform can be developed consistently on the basis of design thinking to combine user requirements, technical feasibility, and business benefits,” Dietzold said.
With the COVID-19 crisis, modernizing and digitizing in the healthcare industry is more crucial than ever. However, in the health sector, the use of networked machines and data is still in its early stages. In a consortium built by a university hospital and together with research and industry partners, the OP 4.1 project developed a prototype of a user-centric, open, and extensible platform for the operating room of the future. The project is part of the technology program Smart Service World II, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
The project’s vision was ambitious. Its goal consisted of simplifying and significantly accelerating the transfer of research results to clinical practice for the greater benefit of patients.
Applying SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation, it quickly became clear that moving toward realizing this vision meant leveraging various strengths of the Business Technology Platform and accelerating the transformation of data into value. The project’s core technology is SAP Cloud Platform, which serves as the foundation for the OP 4.1 platform prototype. The prototype delivers a technical and commercial basis for the development, distribution, and simple implementation of innovative apps in the operating room environment. Four innovative partner apps have been showcased on the platform already.
OP 4.1 Project Manager Michaela Epp states, “We are proud that SAP won the Gold Award and that the jury acknowledged that we developed the business and technology platform consistently on the basis of design thinking, in which user requirements, technical feasibility, and business benefits have been perfectly combined.”
Stax Allows Zookeepers to Spend More Time with Animals
Taronga Conservation Society Australia and Melbourne-based SAP AppHaus Network partner Bourne Digital have been rewarded with an Honorable Mention for the 2020 SAP Innovation Awards. Bourne Digital leveraged design thinking to enhance Taronga’s staff and animal experiences in zoos.
Moving to the cloud to streamline key functions, including finance, procurement, payroll, and human resources, Stax, a staff experience application, was built on SAP Cloud Platform. Deep, end user research led to great results: The mobile and desktop application keeps the staff informed on key zoo updates, uses map technology, and simplifies access to core administrative tasks. The benefits lie in enhanced employee productivity, which ultimately leverages customer experience.
Innovating Holistically with a Joint Approach
The SAP AppHaus Network has a vision that by 2025 all customers will run an innovation approach that focuses on people first. Therefore, SAP AppHaus aims to scale its innovation culture and create an ecosystem of change makers beyond SAP borders.
This can be achieved by applying SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation in customer projects to support the entire innovation life cycle from the generation of new ideas to the development and delivery of high-value applications. Once an idea is created, solution delivery and scaling are enabled by utilizing the capabilities of the Business Technology Platform, a portfolio of integrated solutions that helps companies connect processes and experiences, act with integrity and confidence, and drive essential innovation through intelligence embedded in every interaction. It brings together database and data management, analytics, application development and integration as well as intelligent technologies.
What’s more, the SAP AppHaus Network is ready to support innovation projects even during COVID-19 , with existing and planned virtual offerings. Explore existing virtual offerings of SAP AppHaus Network partners and the SAP AppHaus Innovation Culture Toolkit to learn more.
This story originally appeared on the SAP Germany News Center.
