SAP Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) will invest €1,000,000 to One Billion Lives (1BLives), a crowdsourced region-wide initiative employing SAP technology to deliver sustainable, commercially viable social impact.
In the program’s second year, five employee-driven ventures were selected to receive seed money of up to €200,000 each. The five wining ventures will be guided by experts, mentored by the SAP.iO Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program and coached by industry specialists.
“1BLives exemplifies our role as an organisation to improve the lives of the people in the communities we operate in. It is a unique space where SAP employees can act as entrepreneurs and develop sustainable social impact at scale around a cause they are personally passionate about,” said Scott Russell, president, SAP Asia Pacific Japan.
“This is only the beginning and a catalyst for innovative ideas. We will support these teams with a robust framework, mentorship and technology as they engage with non-governmental organisations, partners and the broader ecosystem to validate and realise these ventures.”
The five ventures, which are part of an early stage social-impact incubation arm at SAP.iO who mission is to grow the next generation of disruptive new businesses for SAP, include:
- Digital Aged Care: This venture looks to leverage the Internet of Things platform that connects wearable devices and smart household devices to monitor an elderly’s condition to provide better efficiency for aged care givers. The aim is to increase quality of health care, and enable a better functioning of the aged nursing workforce.
- Accessible Eyecare: With preventable blindness common and set to rise in rural parts of India, people are dissuaded from visiting the eye clinic due to travel time. This venture hopes to leverage SAP Leonardo to provide an intelligent mobile platform for ocular diagnosis, helping victims make earlier corrective action remotely.
- Food Waste Management: Kicking off in Thailand, this venture aims to create a supply chain management platform to salvage unwanted food and connect it to a demand, stemming hunger crisis for those in need.
- Water Management: Non-revenue water is the water lost in cities through water supply systems between source and end user, which contributes to waste totalling $14 billion a year. This venture aims to minimise this loss in India through the use of SAP IS Utilities to attain real-time information from measuring sensors on water loss, combating the issue of water scarcity.
- Disaster Relief Network: Using SAP Ariba and SAP Hybris, this venture aims to leverage a consolidated platform to enable collaboration between all disaster relief parties increasing the effort to impact ratio, helping more people in the long run.
The venture teams are now working in the accelerate phase, where they apply lean start-up methods to challenge ideas through iterations and strong mentorship. The ventures are expected to test their ideas and go live with minimum viable product (MVP) by the end of the year.
“1BLives is a combination of the best SAP has to offer – our values, innovation, culture and ecosystem to deliver on a better Asia Pacific Japan for tomorrow. It is a key part of our strategy to realise SAP’s full potential in this promising region,” said Russell.
Grace Sai, judge for the 1BLives initiative and co-founder and CEO of Impact Hub and partner at Hub Ventures Fund, said, “The 1BLives initiatives is a great benchmark for big corporates like SAP and others to follow. The exploration on how to use a corporate’s own talent, capital and technology to better the world and attack some of the world’s most stubborn problems, is an admirable cause.”
