How to foster innovation in the enterprise

For the large German software company SAP, was a typical dilemma of the chicken and egg. The year was 2003, and was launching its new SAP Net Weaver platform, a clever piece of software that fit with their existing applications for businesses, and helped them talk to each other and with applications not created by SAP.

At that time, SAP was to get the best of a new system to integrate software called service-oriented architectures, which allowed computers to more easily share their data and services.

The dilemma was this: the true potential of the product would not be apparent until they begin to deal with customers and find out what they could do with it. But customers may not adopt SAP Net Weaver, which was giving away as part of its applications until they could capture its potential.

Even the early adopters of Net Weaver, usually tech-savvy customers, had problems with the most basic aspects of the program. And SAP was not the scope nor the resources to train and educate its entire customer base, let alone educate tens of thousands of consultants in systems integration.
This is where the executive board member Shai Agassi SAP had a great idea: why not allow all SAP customers, systems integrators and independent service providers will be taught each other as equals, as they learned to use Net Weaver?

The result was the SAP Developer Network (SDN), a creative space with forums, wikis, videos and blogs aimed not only to SAP customers but also to others whose participation would be crucial to the success of the platform. SDN community grew quickly and force and thereby able to establish SAP Net Weaver as their clients.

The story is instructive how Shai Agassi and his team went beyond the corporate limits of SAP (after convincing SAP internal groups to create a community and not many ") to link a vast network of developers, consultants, users, opinion leaders and experts. Few of them were employees of SAP, but almost all were passionate about the software. With minimal cost to the company, compared with models that push the technology-SAP channeled the collective power of hundreds of thousands of talented individuals to help him achieve its strategic objectives. In fact, Shai Agassi was "pulling from the top" to raise the level of learning, innovation and performance of SAP.

How can other institutional leaders to do something similar to promote the emergence of creative spaces and curves of collaboration? Here are four general suggestions:

1. Redefine the institutional challenges and opportunities. Institutional leaders now focus primarily on attracting and developing talent within their own institution. The ingenuity of the idea of Shai was to look beyond the boundaries of the enterprise to access and develop the talent needed SAP. Put more broadly, leaders must redefine the reason why the institution exists, breaking down institutional walls to move from a scalable system to push one pull.

2. Identify and mobilize individuals passionate. Shai Agassi did it for the money, he had sold the company he founded, Top Tier Software, SAP at U.S. $ 400 million in 2001. But SAP followed six years because he was convinced of the ability of software (and in particular of Net Weaver) to produce a tremendous impact on the world through productivity improvements. SAP CEO Hasso Plattner recognized the passion of Shai and invested in it, even though many in the company perceived Shai, who had risen from the ranks of SAP, as an "upstart" or even as a renegade.

Individuals are usually passionate talented and motivated, but are often dissatisfied: they see their own potential and that of the institutions where they work, but you can feel blocked when they endeavor to achieve. Leaders must establish institutional mechanisms to ensure that these individuals are connected to each other, and they must become their champions.

3. Reorient institutional activities. Mobilizing the passion means rethinking the strategy, organization and operations. The strategy gives priority to the growth needed to create new things that are made by passionate people. The organization is moving toward the scaling of equipment in building large spaces where people get better faster by working with others. Operations focus on the two or three initiatives that attract people passionate about the arrangements to operate successfully in less structured and defined situations. The modified system of incentives and rewards to help these people continue to learn-through successes and failures-and the reward for taking more short-term risks.

4. Adopt new forms of information technology. The younger generations are using Enterprise 3.0 technologies to connect with peers outside their companies. This contrasts with Enterprise 2.0 tools that focused primarily on collaboration within the company. Generation 3.0 at some point will drive the definition and development of new IT architecture designed to build relationships of trust and long term from thousands of independent institutions, rather than short-term transactions and closely defined that run mostly in a single institution. Institutional leaders must recognize and embrace these new forms of IT.

What are early examples of institutional change do you see? Are our institutional leaders prepared for the challenge? What else would you say to change in this new context of systems based on pull technology?