The 2018 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award has been won by Immersive Experience from the Global Customer Operations board area.
SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced the winning team and greeted them onstage during a global employee meeting in January.
SAP Executive Board Member Adaire Fox-Martin, Global Customer Operations, was also present to congratulate the team: “I am so proud of the Immersive Experience team. I know that they threw their heart and soul into this initiative. It is already making a difference to SAP customers as we demonstrate, in an immersive and experiential way, the opportunities our products provide to achieve the business outcomes and the business value they desire.”
Comprising employees from across the company, the cross-functional, 15-person strong team developed a new way to engage with customers using a Design Thinking approach and learning from other industries such as theme parks, broadcasting, and theater companies.
Immersive Experience is far more than just a conference room. Using advanced touch and display technologies and customized content, it provides a 360-degree view of how an intelligent business could be run and aims to immerse customers in their own story. By putting its visitors in the middle of this experience, they reimagine the customer engagement and touch their visitor’s hearts in an innovative and memorable fashion.
The Immersive Experience concept is scalable, flexible, and can adapt to the needs of any customer. It helps them to visualize the impact of SAP solutions on their businesses more easily and run their operations using technology tools like SAP Digital Boardroom.
More than 150 personalized customer sessions were hosted in the Immersive Experience room in Walldorf from February to June 2018.
“Immersive Experience is for everybody,” said Angelique de Vries, project lead for Immersive Experience and head of Global Presales and Solution Experience at SAP. “Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is so amazing. It inspires us to constantly drive for innovation. Working with such a talented team makes it so much fun and this creates the success.”
To celebrate, the team was not only awarded with the trophy, but also received a €10,000 donation check for a social project of their choice. They decided on TechGirlz, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce the gender gap in technology occupations. The team chose the project to enable this nonprofit to follow their innovation path and foster innovation – just as they did.