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SAP Hackathon Winners’ Plans to Build Smart Cities for a Sustainable Future

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This February, SAP UK&I Innovation Labs held a 48-hour immersive experience challenge for our partner ecosystem which saw Atos, IBM and Deloitte come up with some of the most innovative city distribution, waste management and city planning ideas to feed the smart cities of the future. 

To set the scene, the year is 2032 and each team needs to find a way to feed the smart cities of Sci-Valley. In Sci-Valley they are driven by technology, landfill is non-existent and instead waste is composited to heat homes. Reusing and recycling is the new norm. Whilst Sci-Valley has taken commuting to the sky, supply routes haven’t seen the same shift and now SAP’s partner ecosystem need to find a solution to the increased shortage of food and many other necessities blocked by traffic and their rapidly growing population.  

Atos won the Boundary Breakers category for the most impactful solution with its ‘Intelliwaste’ pitch, which incentivised waste management with a credit-based consumer portal which allows the organisation of recycling with collections. The more sustainable collections cost less credits and less sustainable cost more credits. We then had NTT Data as runners up, with its solution for an integrated closed loop citizen-centric smart city.  

For the SAP BTP Prodigy category, which celebrated the team who showed the best use of technology, Deloitte came out as winners with its idea for an optimised transport supply chain. The idea centred around creating a web experience to track flight paths of the drones as well as being an insights and data hub for waste management and city distribution in real time. Incture was runner up with its vision of an end-to-end SCM and waste management solution.  

Finally, IBM won the Vision Masters category for the most innovative solution focusing on vertical farming. With this it utilised the Business Technology Platform to produce real time insights on the benefits of vertical farming on the environment. Delaware came second with its on-demand drone food delivery service solution. 

To ensure that we had experts to cover each category, we chose both internal and external judges from various backgrounds. We had representatives from ERP Today and the SAP User Group as well as SAP customers Transport for London (TfL) and BorgWarner. 

“It was great to see such a bunch of clever people using the BTP technology for the benefit of the society and a lot of things may be applicable to TfL.” – TfL. 

Following the Hackathon, we’ll be continuing with ‘Hack to Build’ which will help our partners look to implement their pitches into their own futures as well as their own ecosystems, helping to leverage meaningful strategic capabilities and build a better future.  

We thank our participating partners who joined us for our Hackathon and contributed some incredibly innovative ideas, as well as our judges for taking the time to carefully consider each pitch. To find out more from the winning teams, along with Nadine Elsham, and Vivien Boche from SAP, listen to our InnovationX Podcast or watch the replay of the challenge here. 

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