Innovation Actualised for Business and Society: SAP Innovation Awards 2021

Inspirational innovation successes delivering sustainable impact and solving challenges across business and society - as we enter the final weeks for submissions to the SAP Innovation Awards 2021, the time really is now to make your entries before the deadline of February 1st! The categories for 2021 are Social Catalyst, Industry Leader, Partner Paragon, Business Innovator, Transformation Champion, Cloud Genius and Adoption Superhero – aiming to recognise and celebrate future-thinking companies and individuals that are actively harnessing the capabilities of SAP product solutions and advanced technologies to drive innovation creating positive economic, environmental, and social impact at scale. 

So, why does this matter so much? Alongside showcasing and celebrating organisational, project and team achievements, this sharing can both inspire others and also tangibly support them to ‘mind the (transformation) gap’ to optimise their future innovation efforts. This coming at a moment where identifying and recognizing the catalysts of innovation for business and broader societal change has probably never mattered more - helping to move beyond digital resilience, and forward to digital growth.

Embarking on digital transformation initiatives to innovate and better position for the future is critical to navigate and moreover thrive in a context of continual and often ambiguous rapid and volatile change. On the one hand it brings burgeoning requirements, for example alongside massive data growth comes privacy, security, governance and compliance considerations that varies across geographies. And on the other, it enables dynamic and enriching opportunities to adopt and integrate advanced technologies for the new insights that can identify emerging product, service and business model opportunities. Bringing together the right combination and alignment of strategy and shared vision, technologies, processes, culture, people and skills best practices is vital, especially given the expectation and actualisation gap that can sometimes occur between anticipated benefits and real-world outcomes, and in order to enable change that both scales and sustains too.

Recent research by BCG indicates three core pillars to serial innovation success, namely a sustained commitment including pursuing opportunities beyond your core, embracing the benefits of scale and ensuring calibration of innovation systems for success. Elements of this can be found right across the SAP Innovation Award 2020 entries, with previous winning examples and pitch decks available to help inspire your submissions covering impactful change across productivity, innovation and positive disruption, right through to informed insights, engagement and content-centered collaboration. Time to begin those new entries now! :)

One example is the journey of Magic Leap to becoming an Intelligent Enterprise within the spatial computing space - and a worthy winner in the 2020 Business Transformation Champion category. Magic Leap’s vision is to harmonize people, technology, biology and creativity to create a better, more unified world, and ‘reveal new worlds within our world’. Transforming from a start-up accustomed to quickly transitioning from idea-concept-shippable product, to an intelligent enterprise capable of executing at scale whilst still retaining agility, the organisation selected SAP as its business platform implementing SAP solutions S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Commerce, Cloud for Customer, Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, with Deloitte as implementation partner. The benefits highlighted below speak for themselves! Moreover, this was a very timely transformation reflecting on the accelerated technology adoption catalysed by Covid-19 with increasing appetite for immersive experiences such as XR in the enterprise today, and into the future. 

Another example for further inspiration comes from IVAGO which operates in the waste and recycling industry in Belgium, and demonstrates the capacity to achieve shared value business transformation with wider societal impact too. The company wanted to tackle the growing social and environmental problem of illegal waste dumping in Ghent, contributing towards enabling a cleaner city and affording scale-out opportunities country wide. Use of SAP technology allowed IVAGO to move beyond fragmented information sources to storing of all of its information in a single location. And in so doing, this set the foundation to build advanced analytics solutions, with real-time operational insights to optimise day-to-day activities - and mid-longer-term insights to analyse the past and better plan for the future. Adoption of SAP Analytics Cloud actualised the streamlining of everyday operations alongside enabling critical co-operation with the local community. Citizens can (re)act immediately on violations of illegally dumped waste using an app notifying IVAGO where it has been dumped, sending a picture with geo-coordinates. A fantastic example of technology, business and community in partnership, co-creating solutions to last.

Final Thoughts

Showcasing inspirational stories across incremental and rapid innovation, from SME to large enterprise and from process and products, to people and storytelling matters. It can inspire change, empower confidence and cascade best practice to optimise investment in innovation and develop future capacity too. Indeed, in today’s global context of continual and often ambiguous change -  and at a time where ever-greater IT transformation, agility, flexibility, and cost savings are key imperatives - innovation has probably never mattered more becoming the critical catalyst to retain or build sustainable competitive advantage for business, and a driving factor for social impact change aligned to the UN’s SDGs.

So, the time is now to recognise the people and organisations driving change and to share their stories! And as a reminder, this affords a ‘greater good’ benefit too with SAP ‘paying it forward’ by donating $20K to The Acumen Fund and the Global Business Coalition for Education as part of the awards design. So what are you waiting for! There are just four simple steps to enter to share your important story too! Full details on the timeline of the awards, judging criteria, category definitions and prizes can be found at the dedicated website. And finally, a friendly reminder all entries for the SAP Innovation Awards must be received by February 1st 2021.

Good luck everyone! 

About the Author

Prof. Sally Eaves is a highly experienced Chief Technology Officer, Professor in Advanced Technologies and a Global Strategic Advisor on Digital Transformation specialising in the application of emergent technologies, notably AI, FinTech, Blockchain & 5G disciplines, for business transformation and social impact at scale. An international Keynote Speaker and Author, Sally was an inaugural recipient of the Frontier Technology and Social Impact award, presented at the United Nations and has been described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’ - founding Aspirational Futures to enhance inclusion, diversity and belonging in the technology space and beyond.