Methods

Practice Human-Centered Innovation Step by Step

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Process: SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innnovation

Human Centered Approach for Innovation

SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innnovation is an end-to-end process that supports the entire innovation lifecycle: from the generation of novel business ideas to the development and delivery of high value solutions. Here you will find methods to apply SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation at every stage of your project.

People

People are at the core of innovation. Organizations can enable people with the right skills, mindsets, and competencies for creativity and collaboration.  Our methods and offerings help people grow as innovators.

Explore Opportunities

Explore Phase

The goal of the Explore phase is to identify the most valuable business challenges and use-cases to focus on together with your key business and IT leaders. The resources below will help you to complete this phase.

Place

Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterward, our buildings shape us.” As organizations begin practicing innovation, they need to be surrounded by spaces that support creative work. Our methods help customers turn spaces into creative places.

Discover Challenges

Discover Phase

The goal of the Discover phase is to gain a deep understanding about the challenges to solve through observation, interviews and market research. Here you will find different resources to help you through this phase.

Leadership

A culture of innovation can only flourish when it’s supported by the organization’s leadership. Executives and middle management need to have a human-centered mindset to empower their people and nurture practices for innovation. Our methods create awareness and help leaders grow creative mindsets and competencies.

Design Innovations

Design Phase

The goal of the Design phase is to identify the best solution ideas and convert them into tangible prototypes that can be validated by end-users and other stakeholders. Here you will find different resources to help you through this phase.

Deliver Solutions

Deliver Phase

Develop the architecture solution and deliver value for your end users by leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform. Here you will find different resources to help you through this phase.

Technology

Technology is foundational to practice continuous and scalable innovation. SAP Business Technology Platform provides unified data management to connect, discover, and orchestrate data; intelligent technologies and analytics to improve analytical and transactional workloads; application services to simplify extension and integration across the intelligent suite. Here you can find resources on SAP Business Technology Platform technologies, and SAP UI technologies.

Methods to Understand your Business

Methods to Understand People

Methods to Generate Ideas

Methods to Prototype Solutions

Design Thinking

SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation starts with Design Thinking, empathizing with the end-user to discover their needs. Design thinking is a mindset and a creative, human-centered approach that leverages empathy, collaboration, rapid prototyping, and continuous feedback to tackle problems. The methods in this section will equip you and your team to develop competency around these pillars.

Architecture Thinking: The Lean Architecture Toolkit

Architecture Thinking uses the data, processes, and system components to assess how the solution will be scaled from both technology and business perspectives. These methods will help you run and scale your solutions.

66 Methods
Gen AI Explore Workshop Icon

Generative AI Explore Workshop

Identify business challenges and opportunities that can be addressed using Generative AI.
Explore
Architecture Roadmap

Architecture Roadmap

Identify actions to realize your architecture
Explore

Software Distribution Diagram

Break down a complex IT-landscape and show how your solution is hosted.
Explore
Solution Concept Diagram

Solution Concept Diagram

Draw a high-level representation of your solution
Explore
Discover Phase Recommended Path Icon

Discover Phase Recommended Path

Complete the Discover phase step by step to scope your project and understand your users' needs.
Explore
Solution Realization Diagram

Solution Realization Diagram

Explain your target architecture with solution building blocks.
Explore

Solution Context Diagram

Visualize how your solution relates to your organization.
Explore

Meeting Workout

A practical and playful instrument to help you exploit how to reduce your meeting time and get the most value out of your meetings.
Explore
Scenes

Scenes

A tool to create visual stories about product and service ideas fast, collaboratively and iteratively, no drawing skills required.
Explore
Business Model Innovation Canvas Icon

Validate Your Business Model

Verify that your prototype is viable from a business perspective
Explore

How to Build a Prototype

Make ideas tangible and ready for validation by creating a model of how they might work.
Explore

Flex Team Workshop

A Design Thinking Workshop to Reimagine Hybrid Work
Explore

The Next Way of Working

As the world slowly reopens after Covid-19, we reimagined hybrid work for an innovation team. This white paper tackles the challenge: How might we design a hybrid way of working so that we can innovate effectively?
Explore

Spectrum

A collaborative tool to build innovation teams in organizations. 
Explore

Design Thinking Leporello

A simple tool to walk customers through an idealized design process.
Explore
Mosaic Tool

Mosaic

MOSAIC enables teams to prototype a future creative space based on their way of working.
Explore

Innovation Culture Assessment

An tool to asses your organization’s innovation readiness. Identify barriers for innovation and develop strategies to overcome them. 
Explore
Dot Dot Bot

Dot Dot Bot

Design your own chatbot with Dot Dot Bot.
Explore

UX Value Calculator

See how focusing on creating great user experiences can translate to real business value. 
Explore
Explore Phase Recommended Path Icon

Explore Phase Recommended Path

Don't know what method to start with? Follow this path to complete the Explore phase step by step.
Explore
Design Phase Recommended Path Icon

Design Phase Recommended Path

Complete the Design phase step by step and transform ideas into concrete solutions.
Explore
Deliver Phase Recommended Path Icon

Deliver Phase Recommended Path

A guide to complete the Deliver Phase methods step by step.
Explore
Measuring tools on. table

Introduction to the Lean Architecture Toolkit

The Lean Enterprise Architecture Toolkit is comprised of 15 methods: 7 methods help to describe the business domain, and 8 methods help to describe the technical domain. Learn how to apply these methods in your projects.
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Lean Architecture Toolkit Express Path Icon

Lean Architecture Toolkit Express Path

While all Architecture Thinking methods have their purpose and value, some of the methods can be optional when describing a “Minimum Viable Architecture”, for example. This guided path shows you in what order to complete this minimum set of methods.
Explore

Innovation Toolkit for Virtual Collaboration Bundle

This method bundle contains access to several Innovation Toolkit methods in MURAL to support you during your virtual collaboration sessions.
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Generate 100 Ideas in 30 Minutes

With this method, you have several associations and constraints combined to create as many ideas as possible.
Explore
Align With Corporate Strategy

Align with your Corporate Strategy

Articulate how your project goals support the company’s strategic goals by breaking them down into a set of measurable objectives, projects, and initiatives with a strategy map template.
Explore

Involve Your Key Stakeholders

Identify whom to work and align with while exploring and defining use cases and the architecture of your aspired solution with a stakeholder map and stakeholder matrix.
Explore
Identify business challenges

Identify Business Challenges

Use a questionnaire to discover pressing challenges in your business area.
Explore
Use Case Exploration Workshop

Use Case Exploration Workshop

Generate use case ideas and identify the most promising ones to implement.
Explore
Identify Scope Architecture

Identify the Scope of Your Architecture

Define the scope and the business rationale of your innovation project and its architecture with the Statement of Architecture Work template.
Explore

Define Architecture Principles

Set constraints and guidelines to develop the architecture
Explore

Risk Analysis

Identify, classify, and mitigate risks for the architecture. 
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Evaluate a Project Idea

Evaluate and prioritize ideas collaboratively based on selected criteria using a value heatmap.
Explore
Use Case Blueprint

Use Case Blueprint Diagram

Pivot from Design Thinking to Architectural Thinking by mapping user actions to architectural requirements such as applications, data and specific technical features.
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Architectural Decisions List

Architectural Decisions List

Document your architectural decisions and reasoning. 
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Conceptual Data Diagram

Conceptual Data Diagram

Describes information objects processed by the architecture.
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Environments and Location

Environments and Location Diagram

Shows the geographical location of building blocks and runtime environment specific details. 
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Evaluate Your Use Case

Learn how your use case ideas can be implemented with SAP technologies by finding similar existing use cases
Explore

Define Your Use Case

A short and concrete description of a use case idea for future implementation
Explore
Collection of Innovation Opportunities

Collect Innovation Opportunities

Identify innovation ideas to overcome concrete business challenges, external risks and internal barriers.
Explore

Define a Solution Vision

Use the Vision Board to set and align expectations about a solution that a team envisions.
Explore

Synthesize the User Interviews

Derive insights from your research data using visual artifacts and storytelling.
Explore

Formulate a Problem Statement

Transform the research findings into challenging questions for ideation
Explore

Process Mapping

Map the process of a given design challenge with key stakeholders and their connections to discover actionable insights. 
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Define a Persona

Create an archetype of your users from end user interviews to guide future design decisions.
Explore

Reframe the Challenge

Making a high-level design challenge more specific and actionable by brainstorming and prioritizing target users, experiences, and constraints.
Explore
Remember the Future

Remember the Future

Set up a vision of success for the use case and milestones that will help you achieve that vision
Explore

Identify Key Stakeholders

Understand how the key stakeholders interact and influence each other
Explore
Stakeholder Matrix

Map Architecture Stakeholders

Understand key stakeholders for your architectural work and manage support for your architecture
Explore

How to Conduct Field Research

Conduct interviews and on-site observations with end-users for the project
Explore

Capture Feedback

Use the Feedback Grid to capture impressions and ideas from users, stakeholders and experts about your projects, and have a structured approach to derive learnings and insights.
Explore

Create an Investor Pitch

A short description of your solution and the problem it solves that can be presented to management and key stakeholders for sign-off.
Explore
Vision Storyboard

Vision Storyboard

The Vision Storyboard is a visual story of how a proposed solution idea could be used in a possible future scenario.
Explore
Idea Napkin

Idea Napkin

Describe your ideas from brainstorming and make them easier to prioritize.
Explore

Ideate with 6-3-5 Brainwriting

Generate ideas with 6-3-5 Brainwriting brainstorming, a technique that encourages to build on the ideas of others.
Explore
Ideation Guide

Ideation Guide

Generate ideas in quantity and do it in structured yet creative ways.
Explore

Map the User Experience Journey

Understand user's actions, challenges and motivations over time to derive insights about the use case.
Explore

Define a Game Plan

Use the Game Plan to get a deeper understanding into the vision, success factors, challenges, resources and phases that will be needed for your project.
Explore

Create a Context Map

Understand the context of a design challenge
Explore

Prepare For User Interviews

Prepare for user interviews by creating an interview script with your team members.
Explore

Analyze Data and Find Insights…

Make sense of interview findings in the form of stories and visual connections
Explore
Sustainability Targets Card Deck

Sustainability Sparklab Workshops

A set of two collaborative sessions in which a systems thinking approach is used to help business and IT leaders understand sustainability related challenges and identify innovation opportunities with business value and sustainability impact.
Explore
SAP Discovery Center Screenshot

SAP Discovery Center

A low touch enablement, self-service tool that helps businesses to adopt and drive outcomes for the intelligent enterprise. It contains "missions" that will guide you step by step to learn and implement a business specific use case on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Explore

Fiori Guidelines

SAP Fiori is the design language that brings great user experiences to enterprise applications.
Explore

SAP UI5 Library

A collection of libraries that developers and designers can use to build desktop and mobile applications that run in a browser. With SAP’s SAPUI5 JavaScript toolkit, developers can build SAP web applications using HTML5 web development standards.
Explore