SAP University Alliances in CIS region has organized and completed the first innojam as a part of the regional roll-out of SAP Next-Gen Consulting initiative. The SAP InnoJam partnering Sberbank (lagerst bank in Russia) was a unique event where students using SAP aproaches (Design Thinking) and SAP technologies (HCP and Fiori) were offered to solve a real business challenge by Sberbank in a time-span of 28 hours. Being a part of SAP Forum Moscow the InnoJam strongly supported Forum's main theme “Digital Transformation”.
6 teams of students and entrepreneurs from 8 universities of Russia were working on presented to them business-problem "To develop a lifestyle application for the bank of the digital future” using Design Thinking for concept development and SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP Fiori - for prototyping.
On the second day of InnoJam within main agenda of SAP Forum 2016 teams demonstrated the results of their work in front of the SAP CIS and Sberbank jury, including Tanja Rueckert. The winning team from the National research university 'Higher school of Economics' and Lomonosov Moscow State University developed an App which combined a functionality of a project management system and mobile bank using as a back-end SAP HANA Cloud Platfrom. This is a short video of the working process and impresssions on SAP InnoJam: https://youtu.be/ypCbF84WPPE
The following take-outs and lessons-learnt could be formulated as a result of the competed work in setting up, rectruiting for, running, following up on InnoJam event.
Challenges:
Students are motivated with real-life challenges, but this challenges must be relevant for them or they should be able to reach out for proper insights. Let's say that in our case we were lucky enough to have experts to share with students real insights which they used in their concepts. However it's crucial to have real experts in the formulated challenge in the team so that they could internally formulated the necessary number of insights.
Skills:
For the DT-Jams per se no specific skills are needed but common sense and general social activity and involvement, … BUT when it comes to prototyping design, developers’ and engineering skills are required. So my another comment would be to have at least 1 developper and 1 designed in each team to ensure that teams efforst will end up in a prototype.
Recruitment and Selection:
There should be explicit description of the type of even and organizers’ expectations to the participants. The competition among registerants is also a positive factor, the better the profile of participants and the more they are motivated - the better solution they will demonstrate once the challenge time runs off.
Face2Face Recruitment and Seminars:
Open lectures and workshops on methodology and approach used within upciming prior to the event date boost interest and ensure proper candidates to join. Personal invitation always works better, and the skills the students have already mastered might be a good motivation for them to join - just out of the competition spirit.
As for results we should state that design and prototyping is an effective communication channel enabling feasible academia-business interaction and shaping engineering education for next-gen due to huge opportunities for open experience and knowledge exchange with industry/
SAP University Alliances CIS is thankful to Vladimir Pavlov and Ann Ploskonos for the participation in organizing and running the SAP InnoJam partnering Sberban and CIS marketing team (Yulia Molokova and Anna Kopetskaya), for logistics and marketing support.