This blog is about honoring the participants of the team "Money Matters" at the InnoJam Bangalore event 2012 happening from November 24-25 just before SAP TechEd 2012.
These are the team members in alphabetical order:
Thanks again to all of you for this amazing event!
Best,
Rui
This blog is about honoring the participants of the team "Be a Bond" at the InnoJam Bangalore event 2012 happening from November 24-25 just before SAP TechEd 2012.
These are the team members in alphabetical order:
Thanks again to all of you for this amazing event!
Best,
Rui
What an amazing event in Bangalore!
This is the first thought coming to my mind when I look back to the preTechEd InnoJam in Bangalore in the last week of November.
It all started with a great number of people showing up at the cafeteria behind building 2 at the SAP Labs in Bangalore on Saturday morning as I already described in my first blog about this event.
The 136 participants worked in 16 teams which was a big challenge, because at the end of the Design Thinking exercise every team presented their Design Thinking prototype in 6 minutes. So it took some time until we've had every team on stage and present their outcome.
But then the coding started and what should I say ... what an energy the participants had. In a video that I shot at 1am in the morning with around 100 of the 136 participants you could see that all of them were very motivated and wanted to built something meaningful and useful within the given time frame. When the night was over we had 60 participants who didn't sleep at all. Another record at an InnoJam.
Time passed quickly and at 3 pm we started the presentations of the 16 teams. As always I've created "score cards" for each team with pictures, videos and other information. Here they are:
Our three jury members Subrata Das, Sudeesh K and Matthias Steiner listened carefully to the presentations.
They decided that team 3 (System GC) did the best presentation and two of their team members participated with their prototype at the TechEd 2012 Demo Jam in Bangalore. At Demo Jam this team made the second place. What an achievement!
I also invited two of the team members two a wrap-up interview at the SAP TechEd Live Studio where they shared their experience at the event.
At the end everybody had a great time and I loved to be the MC at the InnoJam in Bangalore again.
I told it to the participants at the end of the event: for me it was the most intense and energizing InnoJam I've been so far.
Therefore I'd like to say thank you again to all the participants, Design Thinking coaches, technical experts, jury members, crew members and all the other helping and supporting people that made this event such an awesome experience.
As the participants said at the event: WE LOVE INNOJAM BANGALORE!
Best,
Rui
PS: Those of you who'd like to see more pictures of this event or would like to add their pictures of the event, please check-out our corresponding flickr stream.
I participated in this year’s InnoJam at TechEd Madrid 2012, almost by mistake and had the fantastic experience of winning too. As a non-techy person coming from Presales, I would like to share this 30 hours extraordinary mind blowing experience with you.
SAP TechEd Madrid InnoJam 2012 opened its doors at Sunday at 10AM before SAPPHIRE. I showed up, as my Boss though it was an excellent opportunity for me to participate in.
Frankly, I did not know what to expect. Had never heard of InnoJam. But as the room fills with techies, hackers and developers my smile and courage slowly start to fade away. Reading the detailed agenda for comfort – 00.00 AM to 3.00 PM: Coding, Coding and More Coding, had the opposite effect. I wanted to leave, running. A shaking SMS is send to my boss asking if he has ANY idea what he signed me up for as I can’t CODE! But I stay. Ahead of me lies 32-hours non-stop design and coding competition. I finally got it!
9 teams where formed. I chose the topic “Neighbourhood Care” feeling it narrowly relating to my working space CRM at SAP and joined forces with people I had never met before to design, code and demo a working prototype over the next two days and one night on the theme “Better Cities – Better Lives”. Backed up by SAP Guru tech experts, Design Thinking coaches and SAP mentors, as well as tech experts from event partners Microsoft (with Windows 8 tablets!) and RIM (with BlackBerry tablets!). The winning team would not only receive the very coveted SAP InnoJam winner shirts, but would also present their demo on stage in front on thousands of TechEd attendees on Tuesday evening as part of TechEd DemoJam.
New to InnoJam this year was the Design Thinking. After all teams where formed, clock counting down, the Design Thinking process under the guidance of Design Thinking coaches could start. Interviews, synthesized insights, brainstormed possible solutions was conducted and after all eventually built a low-fidelity prototype. So even though I could not code, I could for now bring value to the design process. Our team came up with a mobile and cloud application for managing a private social neighbourhood ecosystem. Thanks to the neighbours interaction center, neighbours can help each-other with everyday tasks such as car pooling, babysitting, planning playmates and other social activities such as a local community barbecue. We called it WeCare. Time for coding and time for me to step back! Quickly is was decided to go with HANA, NetWeaver Cloud Portal and BlackBerry Playbook. “Who knows Java?” “HTML5?” – certainly not me. But I could design and secure content. I was not completely without work….and get coffee during the late hours of the night. So the WeCare Solution was created during the next 20 hours. What an achievement. Felt exactly like being in High School again!
30 hours after we set out we presented our running solution for the judges and WON. The judges’ comments were that we had a complete solution. Being a diverse team with techies and non-techies, we managed to create a complete solution that was both business viable and technology feasible. It had been some emotional hours for me – from wanting to run screaming away, to standing on the stage as a Winner of InnoJam 2012 with 8 people that I now had tremendous respect for and will keep a close connection too. Mission accomplished and I now received a very bold SMS from my boss: “Now you see why I sent you?”
So next was ‘the big’ stage and DemoJam. 6 hours before actual live presentation, me and Ole, my co-presenter from our partner EVRY, was wired up for testing, coaching and rehearsal. A bit of nerves and little sleep during several days was starting to show…We did not win DemoJam – a wow presentation and solution that had taken one year to build did. But I am proud to have presented on behalf of our team WeCare, a solution build in 30 hours and that did not exist 48 hours before we went on stage.
I tell myself that this has been the one biggest experience at my working time at SAP – I am happy I remained for the challenge
InnoJam Winner 2012 Madrid - Team WeCare
Gitte Winther Bruhn
What an amazing event!– 48 students with 7 members of their faculties learning and coding on SAP’s flagship platforms for three consecutive days at SAP Labs Bangalore in February 2013.
A result of the longstanding collaboration between SAP Labs in Bangalore and the Government of Karnataka, SAP Osmosis was successfully planned and executed by SAP Labs in collaboration SAP University Alliances and many more departments of SAP. - The goal of this event is to help students understand innovation and its underlying processes and dynamics first-hand and get direct exposure to some of SAP’s state-of-the-art platform technologies and products.
After being welcomed by executives from both the government and SAP like Mr M N Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary to the Government, Department of Industry and Commerce, Andy Dey, Managing Director of SAP Labs, and Sunder Madakshira, Vice President Marketing and Communications, SAP Labs, the students received a full-day introduction into SAP HANA, SAPUI5, and SAP NetWeaver Gateway, culminating in an end-to-end use case to bring it all
together.
The preparations were complemented by an overview about the Design Thinking methodology including some pratical excercises and with its key takeaways “make sure that you do understand the real problem” and “always focus on the actual users’ needs”. - Then it was time to code: the 28 women and 28 men formed a total of nine teams and were provided with laptops as well as access to a powerful HANA system; for the technically
inclined, the entire setup consisted of
Of course, there was also a full backup of the central HANA system maintained, based on the standard backup/recovery feature of SAP HANA.
During the next 1½ days, students and members of the faculty worked tirelessly on ideating and sharpening their use cases, discussing and implementing their ideas and solutions; during that period, the friendly and profound help of SAP Labs technical experts for the various technologies and methodologies was well received by everybody.
On the last day, it was show time, finally: the nine teams presented their solutions, all based on the SAP's XS Engine (officially known as ‘SAP HANA Extended Application Services’), in a DemoJam in front of the judges:
Looking at all those great and innovative ideas, the judges did not have an easy task to nominate a winner, based on innovation and uniqueness, intuitiveness of the design and user interface, usefulness, plus scalability and replication, but in the end we had a winner: Team 3 with
‘ShopBuddy’ on the 1st place followed by Team 4 with ‘SAP Trendz’ as a runner-up!
All participants, organizers, judges, and experts were really excited about how young students who had never seen SAP solutions before were able to build in such a short timeframe and everybody was very happy about the great team spirit and the substantial learnings both on the technology and
on the business side. – In fact, the feedback was so positive that it was already envisioned on the spot to have more similar innovation events in the future.
I would like to sincerely thank the combined team of SAP University Alliances and SAP Labs for making this event such a huge success both for
the attendees as well as the Government of Karnataka and SAP! – More than 40 people worked tirelessly, literally day and night, during planning, preparation and execution: colleagues, you all did an awesome job, thank you very much!
And also a big thank you to our students and faculty for their passion, energy and dedication, we also learned a lot from you!
If you are interested in learning more details about the event, please take a look at the following pages:
To learn more about the SAP technologies and platforms used during this SAP Osmosis event, you just need to visit SAP’s Developer Center at http://developers.sap.com/, were information, free developer licenses, and hosted systems are already awaiting you.
Let's start this one with a question: How do you get about 100 students into a room and make them work real hard for 33 hours?
It's quite easy. Promise them the experience of a lifetime, free accommodation and free entry to CeBIT (one of the biggest tech fairs in the world), and you easily overbook your event. That is exactly what SAP University Alliance with the help of TIP Developer Experience, SAP Corporate Social Responsibility (part of Global Communications) and SAP Ecosystem & Channels (running TalentNet for SAP Partners) did --- including the overbooking 
.
We are now well past this year's International Women's Day (big shout to all our female participants) and SAP InnoJam @ CeBIT 2013 is over. I have to admit that I am absolutely surprised and still struggle to find the right words for what has happened. We didn't just complete the event without any major issues and all contestants very happy (my impression 
). We probably made it one of the best InnoJams ever in terms of results produced. I'm saying this because this is the first all-student InnoJam and we weren't quite sure how these young professionals would cope with the heavy workload and amount of new information thrown at them. Then again, they are students, so they are probably more used to this than us professionals. Still. Almost all of the final demos were of such high quality that I cannot stop with my praise. In my humble opinion, I think that the top teams would have been serious contenders for winning a pre-TechEd InnoJam.
Let's go back to the beginning. It's Wednesday, March 6, 9:00 am. We are welcoming 99 participating students (I counted) and also a few observers, i.e. professors, PhD students and other staff. We set them up in a (big enough) room at the Multi-Media Berufsbildende Schule Hannover and let them loose. Well, maybe not exactly loose. At first we give them some context why we are doing this and why they are here. Aiaz Kazi, SVP and Head of TIP Marketing and Developer Relations, talks about SAP HANA and SAP's take on developers, and Ann Rosenberg, Global Head University Alliances, shares her thoughts on big dreams and what students can do to make them come true.
After setting the stage we tell the participants how to do Design Thinking (DT) and guide them through the various phases of running wild and then reigning it back in. Supported by our excellent team of Design Thinking coaches, 11 teams, which we pre-grouped and pre-assigned to one of four challenges, are given the opportunity to make a change for good and dream big for the future of our digital society. In particular, we have the pleasure to welcome representatives from charitable organizations who brought with them a diverse set of problem statements concerning the improvement of their work.
Here are the 4 challenges:
For the research phase, each team is able to do a live interview with the representative that defined the challenge, as they are all on site. BIG THANKs to Gabriele Hartmann from SAP's Corporate Social Responsibility group for connecting these people to the event and organizing their participation. I think it is a superb set of challenges for this diverse set of participants. I cannot say for sure, but I believe the mixture of technical and business students, male and female, coming from 14 countries, contributes a great deal to the excellent outcomes produced by each team.
Now that I mentioned it, I should probably tell you which 14 countries we host. First of all, there is a strong delegation from Poland (about 20) - the focus country of this year's CeBIT. We also have 6 students from Russia, who are winners of a previous student competition held in Moscow last December. Other East European countries comprise Serbia, Slovenia, Romania and Hungary. Two countries we are very pleased to welcome: Egypt and Iraq. We do not usually see participants from these countries at our InnoJams, so I want to extend my gratitude to SAP University Alliances and the local SAP groups for making this possible.We then have a few more "individual flag bearers" from Pakistan, Namibia and Peru (in addition to Romania and Hungary), who are the sole participants from their countries. Our Peru representative made the long way from the other end of the world on her own expenses just to attend. Incredible! Last but not least, we are happy to also count numerous participants from our local DACH region: Germany, Austria, Switzerland. -
OK. Let me do the math. That's 14 countries. Although, I should add that actual travel only occurred out of 10 countries, because some of the students are studying abroad. That's why you will find "10" in the official press announcements (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Egypt, Iraq, Peru).
Now, back to our event. It's getting late and the sun sets. At around 5:00 pm we are done with Design Thinking and teams present their DT prototypes. Receiving some last valuable feedback before the coding part, teams explain their targeted solution with paper mockups and stage plays. Our teams and DT coaches have given their absolute best, and our own Hester Hilbrecht did a tremendous job (again) leading through this "DT sprint". Check out presentations of DT prototypes on YouTube. With the smell of dinner in the air, we decide to move "TechFire", our next agenda point, to afterwards.
Refreshed and with a full belly, we all reconvene and now watch our tech experts introducing the various SAP technologies available to participants. We get 6-to-12-minute pitches (hint to tech experts: no elevator ride is 10 mins long - although I've never been up Burj Kalifa) for NetWeaver Cloud, HANA, NetWeaver Gateway, Business ByDesign, and Workforce Performance Builder. The last one is an InnoJam newbie. With this rough understanding teams go about implementing their solution. The busy season for our tech experts begins. It is 8:20 pm. I see some experts distributing sample code and giving mini breakouts in a corner. Other experts are hijacked and taken right into the more advanced topics of technical support. Let me just give one example here (and every HANA guru knows what I'm talking about): GRANT rights on _SYS_REPO . The night has started.
Those of you, who attended an InnoJam before, know that during "the night" there is a specific atmosphere in the room. While normally people wind down from a hard day at work (e.g. a Design Thinking sprint), InnoJam participants basically commence a double-shift at 8:00 pm - filled with all kinds of challenges, disappointments, moments of euphoria, and the ever-present feeling that the countdown timer is going to hit zero before the demo runs. People are trying to forget about the pressure and stay awake, so (modest!) consummation of beer and Red Bull occurs. Then people start to leave for their beds. First the tech experts (at around midnight / 1:00am) and then participants. Some are just crashing on makeshift beds, e.g. fatboys or sets of chairs. At this InnoJam I also see a few sleeping bag, although I don't remember whether they were used.
Come 3:30/4:00 am we are boiling down to the hard core of "hardcore" participants. This is usually the magic mark. Who makes it past 4:00 am, usually makes it through the night. I count about 40-50 people still in the room, of which I believe 20-25 did not sleep at all, apart from maybe 10 minutes of resting their head on the table. Respect! I think back to my hay days of hacking as a student. And yes, there were one or two times with minimal sleep of 1-2 hours. Good old times. (P.S.: It looks like I'm aging. I myself only had just under 2 hours of sleep and I needed two days to recharge after this event.)
Life returns with the sunrise and the morning. Thursday, March 7, the second day. Teams are pulling back together after having breakfast. You can see full tables of young people in front of laptops. You have to observe this carefully, in order to realize that things are happening. Demos are coming together. If you only pay attention to the despair of some teams, and yes, we unfortunately had that as well, you will miss these magic hours. For me it is the best part. You cannot be quite sure yet, but bustling activity and occasional joyful outcries give you confidence. The countdown continues. At lunchtime there are 2:30 hrs left on the clock.
I am also scrambling to get ready for the finale. The winner's ceremony is taking place at the SAP booth in Hall 4 at CeBIT. So, in-between toilet paper running out in the restrooms, collecting bottles and bits of thrash, printing CeBIT tickets and briefing judges, there is a presentation to prepare. We whip up a few pictures we took during the previous 30 hours and I ask every team to send me a few screenshots of their demo (a live demo with no prep time was deemed too risky).
In the morning, Prof. Peter Mirski (MCI, PDA Grpup) and Jürgen Gieger (SAP Ecosystems & Channels) tell the students a bit about the job opportunities in SAP's partner ecosystem. Career opportunities are of course very important when you are heading towards graduation and I hear that a few students sign up for the SAP HANA Summer School taking place in Austria in July. More possibilities to get educated and network with potential employers are available on TalentNet for SAP Partners.
On the floor, teams are preparing their presentations for the jury. Not to scare students too much, we are placing three slightly familiar faces in front of the stage. They are Aiaz and Ann from SAP, and Clemens from Stifter Helfen. 2:30 pm on the dot it's hands off the laptops and we are starting our demo presentations. The idea is to make this somewhat fair and not create the illusion that teams with higher numbers are safe for some time. We create a draw. Each time a team gets on stage we draw a number and tell that team to prepare to present next. Number 8 and 9 are drawn first and off we go with team 8.
What happens in the next 90 minutes I can only describe as a bombardment. We are all holding our breath while watching one excellent demo after the other. Yes, they are not all perfect when it comes to business case or the actual presentation. However, it is amazing to just look at how well teams used some of the SAP technologies and how well they implemented solutions that are truly centered around the user. This is what I referred to in the beginning. All of the results showed exceptional quality and made this event worth every cent we spent. You can watch all presentations on YouTube. The final presentation sequence is: 8 - 9 - 3 - 2 - 11 - 6 - 4 - 1 - 10 - 5 - 7
Now it is time for the judges to decide and I can tell you it is not easy. Markings are rather close, but after some minutes they boil it down to a top-3. After a few minutes more, they made up their mind. Meanwhile, participants relax a bit with cake, coffee and tea. The respite is not too long though, as we all need to get ready to move to CeBIT. I'm one of the first ones to leave, packed with winner shirts and my PowerPoint presentation. It's starting to rain. What a shame for this fine moment. Oh well, it does not matter. We will be inside among the bright lights of the SAP booth and stage.
I arrive in hall 4 and they immediately guide me behind the stage to get ready. 30 minutes until we are scheduled to start. Fortunately, Aiaz is having a short keynote before our ceremony and running late. This should give all participants time to get here, and me time to finish the presentation. I do of course know who won and select the right team picture. Thanks to Thomas Grassl and Anne Hardy we got a logo wall that provided a nice backdrop for these pictures - taken by the ever-active Phil Loewen (DT coach, contributor of spirit and amateur photographer). We sort the winner shirts and I get my head-mounted microphone. It's real. This is happening. I have no speech prepared. Everything's going to be improvised. No time to freak out.
(P.S.: I'm not usually the type going on stage in front of 100s of people.)
The intro jingle comes on and I hop on stage. I can see the rows of white shirts, which I know are InnoJam participants. Phew. At least I'm not talking to an empty room. I ask the crowd for support. They clap and shout. Great. Time to start my presentation. I estimate there are at least 100 people in the audience who do not belong to the InnoJam crowd. This is not to bad. I tell them about InnoJam, that SAP University Alliances is behind this particular one, what we did, the great spirit and massive amount of Red Bull consumed. I think it's going good. Now, transition to the man that gives this ceremony the flavor or prominence: Mr. Harry Thomsen, Managing Director SAP Germany. Harry comes on stage and shares a few words of amazement and gratitude with the students. They are the "next generation" of our society and also SAP. We, as a company, do care about them very much. It is 5:45 pm. The jury comes on stage. They have a small surprise in store. First off, they announce first place.
And the winner is ...Team "#FOURTYONE1/2" (no.11). Congratulations. You are winning
I think people do not fully understand yet that they just won a trip to Las Vegas. They come to me after the ceremony and ask "Are we really going to Las Vegas?". I tell them: "Yes, and we will send you that in writing". Welcome to your next InnoJam!
After team 11 got on stage and had their pictures taken, I ask them to give a short presentation of their prototype, just so people see what they did. They make it in under 2-3 minutes, which keeps the stage director and me happy. The jury, on the other hand, take their time :). Not a problem. We are the last agenda item for this day. We now announce the runner-ups. First team "IT Pandas" (no. 6) and then team "Meat My Pig" (no. 4) come on stage. Congratulations as well!. Their members are going to receive an invitation to an SAP Start-up Forum near their place of residence and 90 days of free access to SAP HANA Developer Edition. Not too bad either. I'm chipping in a pair of our latest gadget: SAP Developer Center sticky scree wipes. A few more hand shakes and photos and we are done. The booth is transformed for the after-business-drinks-and-snacks party. We are all cracking some beers and celebrate this great event.
THANK YOU everybody!
Thank you participants and guests!
Thank you sponsors!
Thank you judges!
Thank you DT Coaches!
Thank you Tech Experts!
Thank you IT/network support, caterers, venue management!
Thank you organizers!
Thank you SAP!
Thank you CeBIT!
Read On
Credits (in no particular order): Ann Rosenberg, Aiaz Kazi, Anne Hardy, Thomas Grassl, Gabriele Hartmann, Jürgen Gieger, Niraj Singh, Marouan Boukli, Fawad Shah, Waltraud Grimm, Juliane Krampe, Inga Reich, Maximilan Barth, Latha Selvanadurajan, Andrea Tvarusko, Gerhard Oettinger, Hester Hilbrecht, Vitaliy Rudnytskiy, Alexander Graebe, Phil Loewen, Tobias Hildenbrand, Jochen Guertler, Anja Wipfler, Inga Wiele, Sascha Scholz, Carsten Becker, Dieter Breuer, Ralf Sievers, Horst Kuebler, Frank Bannert, Alexander Koerwer, Carsten Boennen, Tobias Griebe, Stephan Klevenz, Christoph Scheiber, Rui Nogueira, Matthias Vach, Xu Xiang, Thomas Gross-Boelting, Thomas Bollmeier, Chris Bernhardt, Benjamin Wegener, Eike Wittkowski, Nadine Langrzik, Mathias Kochrian, Philip von Campe, und viele mehr
Coding just started; all participants are listening carefully to the wise words of the technology experts. People are exciting after the Design Thinking process was finished. Now it is up to the participants to make their prototypes come true! But let me jump to the beginning first…
We are glad to welcome 34 Participants including 14 students – a huge contrast in comparison to the last InnoJam at the CeBIT. As I am participating as a coach, I expect this to be a completely different experience, not only because of the smaller size but rather because of the higher variety of the participants. Most participants are experienced consultants, developers or SAP partners with similar backgrounds. Some guys are familiar with Design Thinking, so they know what they signed up for: A two day long hackathon-like event with lots of challenges and more fun than it may sound like – even for non-techies! Divided into four teams, these participants should tackle one of four available topics:
Several interviews, discussions, presentations and feedback rounds later the teams started off with the ideation phase. Many participants find it hard to suppress their intention to think about the solution as soon as possible – now they are finally encouraged to do so! And this step shows the great influence of Design Thinking at hackathon-like events like this. Even though only two challenges ware chosen by all teams – their insights and understanding of the real problems were very different, and therefore led to very interesting prototype presentations.
… It is 11:00 PM right now and I wish all the teams a very productive night – keep up the good work!
At SAP Denmark we just ended a very successful SAP InnoJam for 40 partners, students and customers.
30 hour nonstop SAP InnoJam session with 40 participants who worked dedicated day and night on a given challenge under the theme "Life Long Learning".
Using the Design Thinking approach they came up with new concepts for solutions and then it was time for the actual coding with our newest technology to
produce a live running prototype.
After 30 hours it was HANDS OFF and we went to Tivoli Congress Center and the big scene. Participants stressed, exited and tightly united into one strong team. All wanted badly to have produced the most innovative, most viable and most desirable application. Each presented their result at SAP Innovation Forum Copenhagen in front of 500 participants; 6 minutes, no slides just a live running solution.
It’s amazing what the teams had obtained. A full concept and live running solution that was not there 30 hours earlier! Neither had the team ever meet before.
Congratulation to the winning Team WeTeach who demonstrated the most innovative solution to support differentiated education at schools!
Med venlig hilsen / Best
Regards
Gitte Winther Bruhn
Customer Innovation Principal I Solution Management
SAP Nordic & Baltic States I Lautrupsgade 11 I 2100 Copenhagen I Denmark
T +45 3913 3386 I M +45 2923 3386 I mailto:gitte.winther.bruhn@sap.com
Hi. It's me again.
I have to say that March was really busy with InnoJams. InnoJam @ CeBIT and InnoJam @ SAP Innovation Forum Copenhagen were real highlights. Following the old tradition of "all good things come in threes", there had to be another one.
Now, this third event which I attended on March 19+20 was called "InnoNight" (or "1st Night of Innovation") and had been completely organized by people at FHWS (Fachhochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt, university of applied sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt). So, in fact it was not an SAP InnoJam by name, but I think the inspiration is obvious, and its success made it nothing short of a real InnoJam event.
Let me just say one thing: This is absolutely awesome! Who would have thought a few years back that this format would inspire people to adopt it for their own developer events. This is exactly what we want. Get it out of the box. Spread forth and multiply. OK, those words might be a bit too strong, but whoever reads this - read it as a call to action. Design-Thinking-infused hackathons really give you another quality of events, and it's perfectly suited to include non-developers as well. Mix in a few SAP and partner technologies and you get a top combination of fun, learning and innovation.
Let us know, if you need help organizing your own event ! - sapinnojam@sap.com
The organizers of "InnoNight" clearly did not need help, as they had it all figured out - pretty much to the last detail (APPLAUSE). They even introduced a new component: SCRUM. I can only commend them for that idea, as it very much helped teams during development. I was doubtful myself, but the structure of 4-hour sprints, sprint reviews and plannings, as well as "daily stand-ups" at each half-way mark actually does help. Team members communicated on a regular basis and, what is even more important, they forced themselves to develop incrementally and plan ahead. In the end there was no sweating 30 minutes before the coding deadline and frantic scrambling to put together a presentation concept. Coding pretty much finished 1 hour before presentations were scheduled to start and each team had their presentation figured out, leaving them a few minutes of respite.
As this event was a warm-up for "Mobility Moves Business" - a congress for mobile people and systems, all "InnoNight" topics involved aspects of mobility and social networks. There was a topic on neighborhood help, one on socializing music taste, one on remote home controlling, and so on. Educational background of the 40+ participants was somewhat diverse, with students from computer science, business informatics and multimedia design, so each of the 6 teams had a good mix of T-shaped personalities in order to tackle the topics in a Design Thinking exercise. This lasted from 2:00 pm to 7:00 pm, when the last team had presented their DT prototype. BTW: Great acting by some of the teams. I do enjoy a good stage play.
Except me, representing SAP, there were also three developers from the mobile solutions team of Deutsche Telekom. They acted as topic experts and SCRUM coaches. The coding part started around 8:00 pm with a short introduction to SCRUM and the selected components of that methodology that were going to be used. Each team had a SCRUM coach, who more-or-less took over the role of SCRUM master. First activity for each team: plan the first sprint. User stories appeared, disappeared, got changed. It all happened like in a real SCRUM project, just a bit quicker. I embedded myself with one team and helped them with their back-end component, which we hosted on SAP HANA Cloud (formerly SAP NetWeaver Cloud). Thanks to Uber-Wizard, ex-teammate and HANA Cloud evangelist Rui Nogueira, we were able to generate the entire persistence, management UI and half the necessary Web interfaces. All of that in the blink of an eye. 
The students then developed additional Web interfaces and an Android app, which allows community members to post requests for help, find requests from others nearby and respond to them. Pretty simple. Pretty powerful.
I wasn't able to attend the congress the next day where the winners were announced, but read all about it here (my team didn't win 
). I can still say is that I had lots of fun and that I was truly amazed how smooth everything ran. Congratulations to all the teams for putting together a number of rather interesting and quite useful apps. Special kudos go to "Team SAP", which embarked on the adventure to use SAP HANA Cloud. It was an honor and pleasure. I think you guys learned a lot and definitely had THE BEST back-end!!!
Thank you very much to the organizers for inviting me: Melanie Saul, Prof. Karsten Huffstadt and Prof. Peter Bauer. Looking forward to doing this again in the future.
Well that leaves only on thing to say: Come and check out our Free Developer Edition of SAP HANA Cloud (your own small app server VM in the cloud).
Read on: detailed report of the event
Hi all,
after my first blog on how you can create a Windows-to-Go Boot Stick with Windows 8 on it,
here are now similar instructions that explains how you install Windows 8 onto a computer that is running on Windows 7
without interfering with this installed OS.
The instructions below will help you to install Windows 8 in parallel to your existing Windows 7 installation on your physical computer.
Using the build in Windows boot manager you can select the OS you want to work with.
Do not get confused with the term "VHD". This is not an instruction on how you install Windows 8 into a Virtual Machine.
We are just using the concept of a virtual hard disk that will be created as one file on a physical hard drive,
We will then install Windows 8 into this virtual hard disk (.VHD file) and boot it from there. The benefit of such an option is that you are running Windows 8 physically on your computer and with the VHD disk you get a kind of container that is separated from your existing OS and that can easily be removed later on.
Disclaimer: This guidance is by far not complete, this guide just explains how you can build a simple Windows 8 installation on a VHD for testing purpose (and for various events, that SAP and Microsoft are offering together). We are not considering any Enterprise requirement, like
Managebility and/or Security in this guide If you are interested in this as well or if you even want to use it on your Corporate Network, then please find more Information on Microsoft TechNet http://technet.microsoft.com . Please also make sure that you have a valid copy of your computer's harddisk in the case that something is going wrong. I'm not taking any responsibility for damages that may happen.
Follow the steps below to install Windows 8 into a virtual Harddisk (VHD)
Prerequisites:
Note: Select the right USB disk, otherwise your other removable disk might be formated!
Now you are ready for the installation from this new media
Ýou now have a Virtual Harddisk with a maximum size of 32GB. So if you create the disk it is quite small, but it will grow to this maximum when needed.
Note: Please select the right disk, aka the newly created VHD file (size about 30GB) !
Link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/set-up
If you are installing Windows 8 in parallel to your Windows 7 system (and this is happening here) then the installation is replacing the
Windows 7 Boot-Manager with the Windows 8 boot manager, but it is including the Windows 7 Boot option within the new boot manager.
At your computer's startup you have 30 seconds to select the OS you want to use in the Bootmanager Menu.
If you want have Windows 7 as your default OS on every computer startup then
In order to get rid of your Windows 8 Installation follow these steps:
More information on WIndows 8 can be found on our Global site http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home
Have fun with Windows 8 !
Jürgen Grebe
Partner Manager
Global SAP Alliance
Microsoft Corp.
After arriving at our hotel near the SAP Netherlands headquarters and meeting our Design Thinking colleagues yesterday evening, things got off to an early start this morning to make sure everything was in place for our Innojam attendees. We didn't need to work too hard however as Mientje Paais, our VNSG contact, and Jan Koster made our life much easier with all the preparations they had already put in place. If you haven't visited the location, and you're in the neighbourhood, then I can certainly recommend a detour to check out the wonderful building here. The coffee is good, the interior is very comfortable, and the welcome is warm.
Many of our (nearly 50) attendees arrived well in advance of the 9.30 registration, which was a good thing considering the big increase compared to last year's very successful event, which had 31 participants. The proportion of attendees with a business background was also up compared to last year's event, with a 60:40 split of developers to non-developers. After a welcome breakfast of donut bouquets, we were welcomed to the event by the master of ceremonies Jan Penninkhof. Pieter Schoehuijs, CIO of Akzo Nobel provided an interesting introduction to the history and innovations of the company, and the Design Thinking coaches were introduced to the participants before everyone moved upstairs to the atrium to get started with the Innojam itself.
Hester Hilbrecht, our lead Design Thinking coach, provided the participants with an overview of the process and Alex Graebe divided them into teams so that they could then start collaborating. The 7 teams engaged with their coaches (Karen Detken, Susanne Benz, Mauro Rego, Marion Froehlich, Gloria Matos da Costa, and Alex Graebe, along with Jan Koster from SAP Netherlands) to learn more about the Design Thinking process and to prepare themselves to interview the experts who would provide them with more information on the challenges they had been set to solve by Akzo Nobel.
After lunch, the teams went back to their hard work for the afternoon, and then presented their prototypes before some SAP technical experts provided a 6 minute overview of some of the technologies available to the teams. Niels van Noort gave a quick primer on HANA modeling (and also provided support for SAP UI5 once the coding started); Matthias Vach delivered a very entertaining preview of the possibilities provided by SAP NetWeaver Cloud; Giel Janssen Lok spoke about the Sybase Unwired Platform and mobile technology; and Robert Eijpe demonstrated the flexibility of the NetWeaver Gateway. Mauro Rego also informed the participants about the additional Design Thinking services that SAP offers to our customers and partner.
These 'teaser' sessions were expanded later for all the participants who wanted to incorporate them into their work, but not before an eagerly-anticipated (and delicious) Indian meal prepared by Haseenah Penninkhof. If anyone is considering attending an Innojam in the Netherlands in 2014, then register early, because it's likely to sell out if Haseenah cooks again next year
Despite the delicious meal, there was a lot of work to be done, and as soon as the groups settled down in their breakout rooms it was all hands to the pumps, providing laptops, software, technical support, and licence keys (thanks Uwe!). What had started as a dull morning had turned out to be a very productive and rewarding day, and a beautiful sunny evening...
As I write this, it's now quarter before midnight, and things look like they'll run long into the night. I can hear music in the corridor, the energy drinks have been stockpiled, and the sleeping bags have been laid out for when some hard-earned rest is finally called for...the impressions from day 2, and some additional photographs are available here.
Following on from my blog post on the first day of the 2013 Innojam at SAP Netherlands, here's a rundown of day 2:
Arriving early for breakfast at 8am, and to learn how the the teams were progressing, it was clear that a lot of hard work had been done. Straightaway, everyone got back to work, knowing that only a few hours remained before the presentation session at 3pm.
After some additional support for the teams, and more coding, it wasn't long before lunchtime rolled around at 12. At 12.15, I took a walk past the team rooms, some of which were still full. "You know that lunch is being served?" "Yes, we know" was the response. Maybe they just weren't hungry...
In the afternoon, with the presentation deadline looming, the teams were still working on their code, but also getting their presentations ready for the jury:
I wonder where the others went...
An overview of each team and their projects will be posted in another blog, but the jury (Pieter Schoehuijs, CIO, and Ria van Waes, Director Information Management, both from Akzo Nobel, and VNSG Managing Director Rob van der Marck) seemed impressed with the potential of all the ideas and applications that were presented. After all the 6 minute presentations were complete, the jury took some time to decide on the winners.
Everyone returned to the presentation room, where it was revealed that the winners were team 1! Team 5 were the runners-up, and team 3 the second runners-up, but everyone felt that their participation had been worthwhile and appreciated.
After the prize-giving and photographs of the winning team, it was clear that people were ready to get on the road for home after two hard days (and one long night) of work, but there was just enough time for goodbyes, a photograph of all the participants, and hopes that we'd all meet again at SAP TechEd in Amsterdam in November...
Personally, I found the event to be both fun and educational, and a real testament to what can be achieved through teamwork, great organization, and a vibrant community like the VNSG. More pictures of the event are available here, courtesy of the VNSG, but I'll close this blog with a little taste of how inspiring the SAP Netherlands offices are. I'm sure it helped with the Design Thinking during this Innojam...
It's sunday afternoon. I just finished my open.sap homework, brewed myself a nice coffee and put my youngest boy to bed. Time to do my writeup off #InnoJamNL (use that hashtag to find some great tweets and pictures).
For me it was a special event. It was my first (community) event as a SAP Mentor. Without the shirt, but with the pride of knowing I was building solutions with guys and galls from the SCN community who nominated me into this great role.
So what is so impressive about an InnoJam? For me it is the competition within teams to build the best solution, without real competition. InnoJam teams consist of SAP nuts (apologies for lack of finding a better word). And do you know what drives a SAP nut? Wanting to build the best solution regardless of the team he is assigned to. Everybody helps everybody. True community spirit
So is it all good? My personal reflection:
The good
1. Work with the latest technology: HANA Cloud, SAPUI5, OData, Business Objects. We've seen and used it all
2. Get a hands on Design Thinking training. Great concept with one thing in mind: build the best solution for your customer (persona) keeping in mind what is most important for him when doing his job
3. An endless supply of Food!
The "could be better"
1. Food. Well, less of it that is. I gained two kilos in 30 hours. I am still hyper from a sugar rush, cannot believe how great that Jägermeister from Fred Verheul tasted in the middle of the night and you lady, you know who you are, I cannot stop thinking about your Indian food!
2. Our solution. It hit me like a bolt of lightning yesterday. Our team build the most (I dare to say best, sorry Leo van Hengel, you know you rock) technical solution using a wide variety of technologies (HANA, Dashboard Builder, Lumira, SAPUI5), but did not finish in the top 3. We had Geographical information in Lumira, dashboards designed by the Dutch crown prince of dashboard design .... and to top it off a UI5 based HTML5 app able to search through data in real time, presenting the results in graphs and tables! It was magic!
So why didnt we win I asked myself? In my opinion, we stepped into the one trap an SAP nut needs to watch out for: wanting to build the most technically advanced solution possible, without re-checking if this still is the best solution for the end-user. And there lies a great learning point. It is not about using all technologies at hand, it is it is about building the best solution possible for your persona. Bob Ross, our teams persona, I know your out there and would agree ;-).
And with that ladies and gentlemen we come back to one of the most important things of an InnoJam: to learn new skills. Surprisingly enough, for me it was not about learning new technical tricks this time.
So that leaves me with some final well deserved thank you's: thank you awesome teams, thank you InnoJam and Design Thinking teams, thank you VNSG and last but not least, thank you beautiful wife and 3 kids for letting me do what I do best: learn new skills, even on a free Saturday, even when they are not technical.
Take care and till next time,
Ronald
Update: check out Leo van Hengel's blog on Winning SAP InnoJam Netherlands 2013!
SAP InnoJam Netherlands 2013 took place on June 14-15 at the SAP Netherlands office in 's-Hertogenbosch. A big thank you to all who attendeed! Special thanks to the Design Thinking coaches, technology experts and organizers from both VNSG and SAP, representants from AkzoNobel and of course Jan Penninkhof as our Master of Ceremonies.
Check out Myles Fenlon’s write-up of Day 1 and Day 2 and Ronald Konijnenburg’s impressions of his first community event as a SAP Mentor. All detailed info about the event is available here including all photos (thanks Mientje!). The final prototype presentations by our 6 teams are all in the video right below:
This was the third SAP InnoJam held here in the Netherlands, and it keeps getting better every year. So what is it that made this InnoJam special?
And the winner was… Team 1. Stay tuned for more detailed information on their demo. Let me just say as a teaser that their final demo scored very high on all three judging criteria: desirability, viability and feasibility!
2013 seems to be a great year for the Netherlands. Not only the re-opening of the Rijkmuseum or the coronation of a new king, but two SAP InnoJam in less than 6 months: SAP TechEd EMEA will take place in Amsterdam on Nov 5-7 and will be preceded by a TechEd InnoJam event on Nov 3-4!
After all the great InnoJams blogs from Julien Vayssiere, Myles Fenlon and Ronald Konijnenburg the winning team of SAP InnoJam Netherlands 2013 cannot stay behind and share the details of their solution. So here is our story and my experiences of winning the famous InnoJam t-shirt.
Design Thinking
This was my second InnoJam with Design Thinking. The first year I participated InnoJam in 2011 there was no Design Thinking involved. We started straight a way with coding back then. Too be honest that's what I like most as a hardcore developer, so when I participated in the InnoJam at TechEd Madrid with Design Thinking I was quite skeptical. Why is there so much time spend on Design Thinking, we can do that in 1 hour and then start coding
But after two InnoJams I really see the benefits of Design Thinking. It really helped our team to build a solution (or part of solution in only 30 hours) which would be beneficial to the user.
A slight change from the previous InnoJams was that this time we could not choose the business case which you preferred most and decide with what friends you would make a team. Because of time-constraints we were divided into teams by Design Thinking coach Alexander Gräbe. I have to mention Alexander, because he really did a great job. I still remember Alexander from SAP TechEd in Madrid where he was in my InnoJam team as a participant and student from the University of Mannheim and look at him now presenting the Design Thinking Concept together with Hester Hilbrecht. Well done!
Alexander explaining Storytelling
Team Enterprise
So Alexander put me in Team 1. So who else was in my team this InnoJam:
A very mixed group with lots of different skills like Modeling, Business Process Management, ABAP, Java, JavaScript, BW, BI, User Action Design, Photoshop, Illustrator, HANA Cloud Platform, SAPUI5. Too name only a few
Even HANA skills were available because who is not following the Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA by Thomas Jung these days!
Glória Matos da Costa was assigned as our design coach to help and support us during the Design Thinking processes like Interviewing, storytelling, creating personas and a prototype. Thanks for your help Glória!
Design Thinking materials and Team Enterprise preparing the interviews
Our Challenge
Every team got a different challenge from AkzoNobel and as team 1 we got the following challenge assigned:
“Redesign the working environment of the board members in the context of the insight on the goings of AkzoNobel”
A very broad definition, but after the first interviews we got a better understanding of the case and we could start working on storytelling, creating personas and a designing a prototype.
Our team name Enterprise came from our first interview where Hans Rietbergen Enterprise Architect of AkzoNobel told us how he imagined an ultimate cockpit with dashboards with alerts similar like Captain Kirk had on Starship Enterprise
Our Prototype
At 16:00 on the first day all teams had to present their prototype.
Team Enterprise presenting our Prototype
After all presentations by the other teams we got an introduction to all Technologies available at InnoJam Tech Fire:
So finally time to start coding but not with an empty stomach offcourse The InnoJam participants were fortunate to enjoy another great Asian dinner cooked by Haseenah Penninkhof. Haseenah is famous in the Dutch SAP Community as she already cooked twice for the SAP Inside Track Netherlands participants.
Delicious Spekkoek
Our Technical Solution
After dinner the teams were ready to take their seat in their team rooms to start designing and developing their solution.
When Matthias Vach entered our room to ask if we would like to use the SAP HANA Cloud Platform I immediately pulled him into the room and drew my idea with the SAP HANA Cloud Connector on the whiteboard. Matthias told me that it might not be necessary to use the Cloud Connector because we were using a SAP HANA Demo System hosted by Amazon so we would have no trouble to access the OData services and easily consume it with SAPUI5.
So off we were as a team. Designing cool UI's with Photoshop, build and model views with HANA based on the tables provided by AkzoNobel, create OData Services with the XS Engine and develop SAPUI5 screens in Eclipse.
The next day we noticed there was a problem with the connection between HANA and the HANA Cloud Platform and discovered that port 8000 used by HANA XS Engine to serve the OData services could not be accessed from the HANA Cloud Platform. Only standard internet ports like 80 and 443 are open to connect with HttpDestination. Fortunately my computer at home was running and I could connect to it with TeamViewer. On my Home PC I have a VMWare running with SUSE Linux and the SAP Cloud Connector. Don’t ask me why…. I just have a lot of Demo systems running at home
It was real easy to setup this workaround with the SAP Cloud Connector. A secure tunnel to my home computer is allowed from the SAP HANA Cloud platform because the SAP Cloud Connector is already running and configured with my own SAP HANA Cloud account. From the machine running the Cloud Connector I could access the XS Services without problems. The picture below shows how we could show a working demo on our iPad.
SAP Cloud Connector in action
With all connection problems solved on a Saturday morning we still had lots of tasks to complete before the deadline of 15:00. Model and create more HANA views, make them accessible with XS Engine, create cool icons and graphics for our entry screens which featured a nice worldmap where the user could click on the alert for more detailed info (see screenshots below). For the charts we used VIZ Charts from the SAPUI5 Controls library. The SAPUI5 SDK provides excellent examples with source code which we could use and with a little help from Jan Penninkhof I could set the binding correctly because the example chart I used was based on a JSONModel not an ODataModel. After 30 hours you somethings cannot see clearly anymore ;-)
Another challenge while building and developing a solution is to keep working together as a team. You tend to focus on your own developments and make that work but at the end you have to combine all separate developments (Visuals, HANA, Services, Cloud) into one product and have a presentable solutions at 15:00 on Saturday. To keep us all focused on the end result Huub Louman did a great job as our Project Manager. Every hour or at least every 2 hours he made sure we got together and sit down for a moment and discuss our progress and what we where able to create in the coming hours and what we had to drop.
Our Final Presentation
For the final presentation at 15:00 on a Saturday Ben took the stage and presented our solution on the iPad. I was only just sitting there as a backup in case my computer at would break down. In that case I could run the solution locally from my laptop, but fortunately everything worked out great and we could show our application on the iPad.
Here are some screenshots from our presentation:
Final Result
At 16:00 after a short break the jury decided that our solution was the winning one from this InnoJam!
Winning InnoJam Netherlands 2013 and getting the famous T-Shirt. How cool is that
Very proud team Enterprise
Special Thanks
To conclude my blog I want to thank SAP Netherlands and VNSG for hosting the event. Special thanks go to Julien Vayssiere and his team, all SAP experts, Design Thinking Coaches, Mientje Paais from the VNSG for all the photos featuring in the blog and excellent organization, Jan Penninkhof who was Master of Ceremonies, his wife Haseenah for cooking dinner and last but least my own InnoJam team. Thanks guys!
More photos of the event can be found over here.
See you all next year!
Henslowe: The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Fennyman: So what can you do?
Henslowe: Nothing! Strangely enough it all turns out fine.
Fennyman: How?
Henslowe: I don’t know it’s a mystery.
The exchange above from “Shakespeare in Love” always played in my head when I was asked; Alan, what is an Innojam? This is a question I’ve had to answer dozens of times in the last few months. I’ve sent links to videos, websites and blogs. I’ve attached pictures to tweets, SMS messages and e-mails. I’ve even occasionally decided to be “old school” and spend 10 minutes outlining in person or by phone the general principles of an Innojam to interested parties. In each case I couldn’t do any justice to the true nature of an Innojam. Although in hindsight, I must, like Henslowe, have generated a pretty convincing facsimile of a man with a full grasp of the facts, given that I convinced so many great people to get involved.
I have the privilege of working with the University Alliance (UA) team for UK & Ireland on a project basis to augment my coreresponsibility as a team manager in Active Global Support (AGS). It allows me get involved with a wide variety of initiatives that engage and recruit new graduates and undergraduate interns for SAP. So when SAP Ireland was looking for a signature event for the 70+ interns we hired this year and the UA team wanted to run a student event that involved multiple Irish 3rd level colleges, I was able to see both demands and suggested Innojam as the single ideal solution for both. Bright ideas aren’t enough however and I quickly found myself volunteered to organize the event. The videos, blogs and commentary all make participating in an Innojam look like a demanding emotional, technical, physical and personal challenge. Well, I can now confirm that the only difference between participating and organizing an Innojam is that the event is a sprint, but organizing one is a marathon. A terrifying marathon!
SAP can be a busy and chaotic environment at times with lots of programs and initiatives underway simultaneously, many of which criss-cross and overlap each other at times. Though frequently confusing and frustrating, what has always impressed me about SAP, is that when you ask for help to simplify things, it is always forthcoming. With a little research, a few e-mails and a couple of phone calls, the team in Development Evangelism (Yes! We such a team) came to my aid. With a lot of experience in Demo-jam, Innojam, and Hack-athon delivery they set me on the right road. I quickly had a set-up guide for Innojam in my inbox, I was off and running confident I had a proven framework for success. What I wasn’t confident of was my ability to fill-in the gaps.
From the outset I was keen to have a real world problem for the students to work on. Involving a customer with real data and real business needs was fundamental to demonstrate that SAP products really do “Make the World Run Better”. I reached out to a world class Fast Moving Consumer Goods(FMCG) customer based in Ireland. They took a little convincing but ultimately saw some potential in getting involved so they helped define the Innojam challenge around Social Media Sentiment Analysis and provided 6 months’ worth of data collected from Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. So 2 months prior to the event I had a customer involved, a theme for the event and up to 70 willing students ready to stay up all night with no idea of what was expected of them. They needed help.Diving back into SAP Ireland again I wasn’t disappointed with response to my call for help for Technology and Design Thinking Mentors. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got a lot of interest and help from the SAP Ecosystem with SAP mentors and partners volunteering their time and expertise. My original terror about arranging thisevent started to ease into a giddy anticipation of what was coming together.
The final 3 weeks in the run up to the event are a blur of stationary, food, T-shirt orders, drop outs, opt-ins, team selections, room preparations, and final confirmations that yes, I was serious when I said “this is an overnight event”. There was a lot of concern that the choice of technology was a match for the nature of the challenge. We were worried that the dataset was big enough to qualify as a “big-data” challenge. I questioned if we have enough development interns in each team? I fell asleep at night going through checklists of things still outstanding and I woke in the wee hours panicked by the thought I’d forgotten something important.
By 8pm on the night before the event surveying the rooms set up by our facilities team I still wasn't confident that I’d done as much as I could. It wasn’t until 10am the following morning when the room was crackling with creative energy that I realized the only thing I had missed was, belief. A belief, that great colleagues, brilliant partners, amazing customers and willing interns are capable of overcoming “insurmountable obstacles” and
laughing in the face of “imminent disaster” by sharing their unique experiences and creating new combined ones. I now know too there is no "mystery" to how they do it. Nobody had told them they couldn’t! We set them a challenge, gave them the tools and the space to innovate and then got out of their way everything else after that was combination of great people with great attitudes.
So Alan, What is an Innojam?
Well it’s a lot of work but as we say in Ireland, it’s great Craic!
More?:
http://scn.sap.com/community/uac/blog/2013/08/19/four-days-with-the-next-generation
It's that time of year again... Europe workforce returns from vacation, kids are back in school and summer is slowly, but surely, starting to make way for the colors of autumn. We are preparing ourselves for the winter months, some of us with anticipation, some with - let's say - mixed feelings.
What do enterprise techies do at this time of year? ... They get all excited, because SAP TechEd season is just around the corner. And 2013 comes with a true gem: Amsterdam, the location of SAP TechEd EMEA. For me it will be a personal first visit to this European capital with its rich, more than 700-year long history, unique architecture and people, and not to forget a nightlife that you hardly find anywhere else. 
...
Derivative work of "Amsterdam CityScape", by Swimmerguy269, used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
But let's get back to the primary reason for this trip, SAP TechEd. New venue, packed agenda, an excited crowd, it's gearing up to be an exceptional experience. And we shouldn't forget about all the innovation and technology that was introduced over the past 12 months: Suite/ABAP on HANA, HANA SPS06, NW ABAP 7.40, HANA Cloud Platform (Neo), to name just a few. Now, think for a second and then tell yourself "what is the most fun-filled and rewarding way to get my hands on some of the latest SAP technology, including first-hand support from a bunch of SAP experts". If your answer is SAP InnoJam, then you are one of the enlightened souls among us. If it is NOT, let me try to convince you by showing you first hand. Seeing is believing, or so they say.
So come join me and all the other cool, geeky, crazy, awesome, ... people that you only meet at an SAP InnoJam. BTW: If you think InnoJam is just for geeky developers, think again. We are not just for techies.
SAP TechEd InnoJam 2013 Amsterdam
November 03 - 04, RAI Convention Center
REGISTER HERE!<= 100 tickets max!
All the latest info on our WIKI page
As usual you get 30 hours to go from zero to app, competing in teams for the coveted "SAP InnoJam Winner" shirt and a spot at SAP TechEd DemoJam. We kept the very successful format from last year and start off with a Design Thinking part (each team is supported by a coach). You pick one of our specially selected challenges, take it apart, wrap your head around it, punch holes into our well-prepared domain experts, toss all of that up in the air, shot down the irrelevant pieces and finally put together an innovative solution in the form of a low-fidelity prototype. Sounds fun? It is, trust me.
In case you want to know what challenges we have in store, I have to tell you SORRY, but that information is top secret. And don't even think about asking a friend you might have in the intelligence community. We are using carrier pigeons and sign language to communicate. 
All I can tell you is that all challenges fit a common theme:
Me, My Health, and The Medicine – Empowering You and Your Doctor to Make Better Decisions About Your Health.
Don't worry. We are not asking you to cure cancer (someone else is already trying), but there are many other things, big and small, that can be improved. In particular, we would like you to use this event to come up with ideas that allow us and our physicians to benefit from the wonders of information age - in the right way. Show us and the world how we can be more conscious about our own physical state. Help SAP make the world run better and improve people's lives.
Using your low-fidelity prototype you will set out on the second part of the journey: to develop running code in less than 24 hours. Under the guidance of our ever helpful technology experts, you will be able choose from a selection of SAP technology products, like SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, SAP NetWeaver ABAP + Gateway, or SAPUI5, and build a prototype that demonstrates your solution idea (less than a day of coding! => concentrate on the core pieces). Put all your experience and ingenuity into that piece of wonder and show us that your idea is creative, desirable, viable, and feasible. Well, in the end you actually have to convince a jury, which we hand-picked to decide if you have what it takes to compete in the DemoJam.
Are you ready to sign up for your SAP InnoJam journey? Go and register now to secure your spot. You can either get a stand-alone ticket or select it as an add-on to your TechEd registration. We are fully catered and equipped, so all you need to bring is your imagination, oh ... and your laptop.
Again, SAP InnoJam is a unique opportunity to do everything you come to TechEd for, but do it in a stress-free, engaging and memorable atmosphere. True friendships have been forged at previous events. And for those of you who are not really into the whole TechEd buzz, this is your chance to take a glimpse into the totally-not-boring-but-super-exciting world of enterprise software.
Stay tuned by checking our WIKI page, and watch #innojam on Twitter or our Facebook page.
Hope to catch you in Amsterdam!
On a sunny day in the end of May of 2013 the SAP Forum took place in a city known for its wonderful chestnut tree blossoms - Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. In the keynote address Maxim Matyash, country manager for SAP Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, announced that SAP CIS recognized SAP Ukraine as the best sales team of 2012 in CIS. Besides the strong sales division, the Ukrainian office can be proud of its Presales, Consulting, and Marketing teams, and developments units specializing in SAP Manufacturing Execution solutions with such customers as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Prodrive, Philips, Hitachi and Bosch. The SAP office is located in the heart of Kiev, facing the Olympic stadium where the final game of the European Football Cup Ukraine/Poland 2012 took place.
Another game, no less interesting, was played at the InnoJam event, in which participants threw an imaginary ball and made a sound or a funny movement or shared an adage performed to foster creativity. The InnoJam took place within the SAP Forum to inspire young talent about enterprise software and its multinational giant. Despite the fact that the end of May is the busiest period in a student’s life – dominated by hard study and final exams – 25 students came to prove themselves in this innovative event at the biggest Kiev university, the National Technical University of Ukraine. After an introduction into the Design Thinking methodology the participants got to know the business cases for the whole day workshop. Several challenges for the InnoJam represented requirements from discrete industries. In 2008 SAP acquired the U.S. based company Visiprise, Inc., a provider for plant-level manufacturing execution solutions, with offices in Kiev, Ukraine and Carlsbad, California. The work force is now integrated into the SAP and as well on the software side the SAP Manufacturing Execution (ME) is now integrated with ERP. Based on a long-term experience of the SAP ME experts Ukrainian colleagues prepared business cases about challenges in the daily life of plant workers and clerks.
SAP experts Anton Steshenko and Dmytro Gladkyi shared business cases related to SAP ME solution. "Every morning, upon arrival to the plant, Dmytro needs to make clarifications with the factory master: on which workbench he should start, how many details have to be manufactured, etc... In addition every workbench has limited capacity and the details need to be processed in the specified order of the production chain. How can we enable Dmytro to get all the required information without contacting the clerk?"
Another topic of big data was in scope. Did it happen to you that during your travel in another country you looked at prices, weights, etc. in the stores and wished to be able to easily compare them to the currencies and weights of your native country? This was another business case which awaited students to be resolved.
Here are some more insights and photos from the workshop:
The students were divided into six teams applying the psychology type selection method (engineer, visualist, analyst, communicator, experimenter, barrier fighter).
Team #1 described their persona – Elena, female, 26 years old, works as a manager, is financially independent, curious, likes travelling and needs a simple solution for travelling abroad. The team's solution was an electronic wallet with GPS functionality which automatically will suggest the required amount of money for the according product.
Team #2 designed a solution for Vasilisa (manager at a big multinational company, 28 years old). An electronic device can be installed in changing rooms of stores. After a simple click on the country’s flag the information about the size, currency, and similar models in a system known by the customer will be shown to the customer so there is no need to search for the information or calculate mentally.
Team #3 presented their imagined character Dmytro who assembles motorcycles at Harley Davidson and proposed a solution which includes a magic glove which enables human to lift details fifty times heavier than it is physically possible and thereby increase productivity dramatically.
After lunch a warm-up game “I am a tree” was conducted to inspire participants to build on each other’s suggestions and ideas.
Teams #4 and #6 presented a mobile and desktop based solution to show detailed information on the work scope for the plant worker including analytical data about his performance and planned turnover saving time and efforts on contacting the clerk.
Team #4
Team #6
Team #5 designed a “plant” glass, which projects the details and graphic guideline for motorcycle production and a cart which contains the details required for a production cycle projected in the glass.
The "I like… I wish…" session finalized the one-day-workshop. The students wished to know where to get the opportunity to participate at more such SAP conferences and to get a position at the world’s business software leader. Isn’t that the best feedback which can be given for a workshop? We can proudly say that all preparation and work brought fruitful results.
The next day Masha Oseeva presented the broad offering from SAP University Alliances CIS – organizers of InnoJam series CIS wide – to the students, professors, colleagues, customers and partners within SAP Forum Kiev.
Students got the opportunity to share their ideas, solutions with the audience benefiting from HANA capabilities as a technology platform.
The winning teams received a prize from Maxim Matyasch – a dinner with the SAP Ukraine director at an Italian restaurant – a great opportunity for students to discuss their vision and aspirations and on the other side to get recommendations for their future carrier from SAP executive.
Many ideas and concepts generated by the students at the workshop were included into the SAP ME backlog by the product owners from the Kiev office. And so a new game was kicked-off in the chestnut tree city, hopefully with many further thick results for the customers, students, SAP, and society.
That's right. "... blue." (not "... SAP.", if that is what you were thinking)
We, the guys with the BLUE logo, are moving full steam towards November 3 when we kick of SAP TechEd InnoJam Amsterdam 2013. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, read my earlier blog post (where you learn everything about 33 hours straight, healthcare challenges, from zero to running code, chance to enter TechEd DemoJam Amsterdam, winner shirt collector's item, etc).
So, let me now tell you a little more about some of the things that wait for you, if you REGISTER. Few tickets left! Hurry!
We do have something OLD, which in fact is not that old. It's the event format that we developed last year: a hackathon that is a combination of Design Thinking and software development. Until now, we only had "satisfied customers". Everybody loves it, so we are going to continue with this recipe for fun design sessions and long coding nights.
We do have something BORROWED, although I probably shouldn't say that. ... I'm happy to announce that BlackBerry is returning to the InnoJam stage with their latest mobile technology. This means you'll get a chance to develop on the BlackBerry 10 platform, and, from what I hear, will be able to show your demos on a BlackBerry Z10. Pretty sleek, I think. And that's not all. Developing with BlackBerry technology during the event automatically enters your team into a separate competition to win BlackBerry Z10 (1 device for each team member).
SAP TechEd InnoJam Amsterdam 2013, proudly sponsored by
Finally, we also have something NEW. We are going to judge you in 4 categories (creativity, desirability, feasibility and viability), with the winner being the team that scores highest in combination. OK, that might be old news, as we did that last year as well. Now, the new component is that we will also award prizes to the highest scorer in each individual category. I don't want to reveal too much here, but we went totally "geek pride".
Stay tuned for more updates... and keep checking our event WIKI page, and watch #innojam on Twitter or our Facebook page.
Unable to attend InnoJam in Las Vegas this weekend but still want to be part of the excitement then why not become a remote expert. Follow the hash tag #InnoJamHelp and provide support to the teams remotely.
At the Young Rewired State coding event in NYC this summer they used this really innovative support model, tweeting for mentor help and it provided invaluable support to the attendees from experts around the world in multiple timezones.
At InnoJam in Las Vegas this year we will also augment the on hand Mentors with the #InnoJamHelp hashtag. If you are part of a team and hit a block, your favorite search engine is not helping, then tweet for #InnoJamHelp. The 36 hour marathon of coding attendees need your help, imagine it's 3am in Vegas, but thats noon in Germany, grab your lunch read the tweets and help a sleep deprived coder.
Join the fun at InnoJam Las Vegas and follow the tag #InnoJamHelp
JohnA
