Over the past few months SAP Labs India has trained and put together a pool of about 100 people who are practitioners of design thinking, its new approach to product innovation where the primary figure is not an engineer but a designer. To set the context, they also work like start-ups in their own space away from cubicles and processes
Tucked away in a corner of SAP Labs? sprawling campus in Bangalore is the ?garage? that is central to the German software maker?s new approach to driving innovation. The work area has no cubicles; just several worktables with wheels and a few bean bags and the walls of the room can be scribbled upon. The ?AppHaus?, as the place is called, is where the research and development arm with over 4500 employees in India steps into the shoes of a start-up.
This week, at the firm?s annual user conference, Sapphire Now, at Orlando, Florida, SAP Labs India will announce two new software products in the sales space developed in 90 days by small teams with cross-functional skills working garage-inventor style in the AppHaus (Haus is German for house). What?s radically new, says Ferose V.R., managing director of SAP Labs India, is how they went about it.
Over the past few months, the company has trained and put together a pool of about 100 people who are practitioners of design thinking, its new approach to product innovation where the primary figure is not an engineer but a designer. It?s a bid to create products that are first and foremost desirable and user-friendly, something like the iPad of the software world. ?The idea is to have small teams, not large teams of 100 or 500 people. So every small team will have a designer-in-residence. In fact, he starts the whole process of identifying what to build by doing end-user interviews. In the past, the designer always used to come last,? says Ferose, adding that they have hired designers from the National Institute of Design for the development teams.
Design thinking, as popularised by the Institute of Design at Stanford University, refers to the process of devising new products with small teams of people with diverse skills who start by observing the problem closely and gathering data before building a prototype. The watchwords are ?desirability, feasibility and viability.?
While the enterprise software maker has been keen to improve on the user-interface in its products to save both time and costs for customers, the push towards design thinking reflects its recent focus on rolling out new business and consumer apps in short development cycles. ?Our differentiator was always robustness in the past, but now you see that it is not always about building big complex products but also about building simple apps. Hence, the shift to desirability and hence we are also now using different methodology to innovate faster. While are we now talking of 90-day cycles, in the past products at SAP used to take one or two years to build,? says Ferose. It isn?t rocket science either, he adds. ?All start-ups probably do the same. Design thinking probably existed but now we are seeing how large companies can adopt this methodology to innovate better.?
Modelled on the d.school at Stanford, the Apphaus in Bangalore is SAP Labs? second such globally after Palo Alto and the initiative is now being adopted at centres in China and Ireland. To begin with, the teams were given thin budgets to shop for stuff like furniture and equipment to set themselves up for a start-up environment.
?Whenever we are doing some early stage work, we find ourselves going there,? says Rana Chakrabarti from the Design and New Applications (DNA) team at SAP Labs which has been working at the Apphaus. ?The quality of conversation tends to better. If you are developing a product which is being improved incrementally, the need for conversation is not high, cubicles are fine. But if you are working with early stage products where we don?t even have specifications, then it helps to have no artificial boundaries.? Rana?s team doesn?t troop into conference rooms for meetings anymore because the brainstorming happens just about anywhere, including the music room. ?If you were to sort of zoom forward two years, the team dynamics will be radically different which means teams will be driving and owning the project, not managers or top-down guidance,? he says.
To be sure, start-ups don?t have to deal the communication and co-ordination issues that big teams suffer from. ?In a start-up, there are no processes because we are defining the process. Here, the focus is on the problem not the process,? says Jayaram Srinivasan, Managing Director of FrontalRain Technologies and a former Vice President at SAP Labs India who co-authored the book ?Managing Innovation from the Land of Ideas and Talent – 10 year success story of SAP Labs India?. FrontalRain, a Bangalore-based start-up Srinivasan founded in 2011 along with two other SAP Labs colleagues, is focussed on software solutions and technology for small companies in the agribusiness sector. ?In a start-up today, everyday is a challenge for me. I have to do or die,? he says.
Among the first products to be built within 90 days from the Apphaus in Bangalore was ChariTra, a software for non-profit organisations, individuals and corporations to connect to each other and pool resources or mobilise volunteers. CharitTra, which stands for Charity Transformation, reached 10,000 users in its first three months and Ferose says he wants to it become the FaceBook of charity over the next few years. Still, the real `proof of the pudding?, as he puts it, is when it reaches one million users or more.Currently, the company has 10 teams trained for design thinking and which are working on as many products, a pace it hopes to maintain every year by looking at new areas. Some of the work-in-progress include a software for the genomics space and retail-for-the-last-mile solutions. ?Again we?ve used design thinking, we?ve interviewed hundreds of kirana store guys across India. We started with two people, now they?ve moved past the stage of prototyping and it?s already a 20 member team,? says Ferose. The team is also looking to build a hardware device that could possibly integrate the app with the Aadhar project by helping kirana stores handle banking transactions. Energy solutions such as smart grids or analytics for electricity billing at home are another focus area for the company. Not all the ideas may see success but the short development cycles and the small-sized teams will make it easier to drop a project and move on to another idea.
?You have to remember that we still build large complex solutions and products which run very large corporations. It?s not the same as building an app, they are fundamentally different things. So we?ll continue to do that. But this is venturing into new areas and we want to do it fast. If you have to fail, fail quickly,? says Ferose. ?We are not disrupting an organisation where all 4500 people are doing design thinking. You have to have your factory method to make things work but you have to have this 10-20% of the people to overcome the innovator?s dilemma. That?s something I think all large companies are grappling with as a challenge. That is why we believe this a big way forward.?