SAP Labs India hosts the SAP Startup Studio, a 100-seat accelerator program for early and growth-stage startups. It is SAP’s first in-house startup accelerator program set up in 2016 that now incubates 16 companies.
SAP Labs India product expert Hemant Rachh and three of his colleagues won the annual SAP Labs India programme, InnVent, short for Innovation and Venture Challenge, with their idea of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software that could convert all leads an organization received into sales. It was the brainchild of Hemant Rachh and one of his teammates way back in 2017.
InnVent is an intrapreneurship programme that encourages employees to think out of the box and develop innovative business plans, build new verticals and revenue streams even without the financial backing of the company. Intrapreneurship programmes such as InnVent empower employees by seeing their ideas into tangible and marketable solutions. This, in turn, keeps relevant, competitive and innovative in their fields.
“We won the challenge, received an external validation and confidence to take the idea forward,” Rachh exclaimed.
With all the team members, Hemant Rachh, Amit Kumar Singh, Mohit Kanoria and Sharath Kumar Raju, having a full-time job, developing the idea was no easy feat as it was fast becoming a full-fledged startup. He said:
“A startup requires a lot of interaction with potential customers to reach and validate the early stages of the product or market fit.”
What enabled them to pull through despite their demanding job schedules was SAP Lab India’s startup-like work culture that supported innovation and provided mentorship, on top of its intrapreneurship programme.
“The programme is exactly the same as going to a venture capital firm for funding your startup idea and we could do it while we had a corporate job,” the Bengaluru-based product expert added.
This was not the first win for Rachh’s team. In 2018, they were one of the two teams out of 500 within SAP to get funded through SAP.iO, a global intrapreneurship accelerator run by SAP and based in San Francisco.
Today, Rachh’s breakthrough startup is called Inversation by SAP and led them to move to San Francisco in February of this year to focus full-time on its operation.
Getting the SAP Support
Dilipkumar Khandelwal, Managing Director of SAP Labs India, approached Racch’s team’s break from their SAP careers as an “entrepreneurial sabbatical” of two years. For him, it’s a win-win situation. The SAP specialists’ running their start-up in the US while still being paid a salary demonstrates how SAP supports talent development and innovation.
Aside from creating a healthy competitive environment and increasing productivity, intrapreneurial programmes enable companies to adapt to changing environments, innovate and solve customer problems.
Khandelwal believes that part of his role as a Managing Director is to ensure he promotes a culture of innovative thinking at the workplace, encourages new ideas and helps with technology infrastructure and funding to build new profitable products for the company. He explained:
“In today’s rapid pace of digital transformation, it is vital to stay relevant and competitive. As leaders, we need to nurture our employees in thinking innovatively and aid them in converting their ideas into marketable solutions.”
He further said that the forward-looking employee initiatives result in low attrition rate, which is a success factor for any firm.
Intraprenuer/ Entrapreneur
In Racch’s experience since he joined the SAP accelerator, an intrapreneur is much like being an entrepreneur. He and his team have been focusing their time and effort in building Inversation by SAP, much like entrepreneurs.
He believes that you need to create something that focuses on solving a problem while validating your assumptions with quick experiments. With regards to teamwork, it means the same in the world of an Intrapreneur and an entrepreneur.
On the other hand, the obvious difference between the two is that in an entrepreneurship-encouraging company like SAP Labs India, the product you develop is owned by the company funding it. However, Racch clarified that it would have been the same, anyway, if they approached a venture capitalist.
