Fucci: Whether it's budgets in Research and Development, we've seen cutbacks in finance budgets, IT budgets, business operations, engineering, all of those areas have frankly accelerated seeker activity with InnoCentive recently. An organization that we probably should talk about a little bit is our client services team. They're an expert group of people within the InnoCentive team that works to develop the right kind of challenges, challenges that are going to get maximum response from our solver community.

At a time when those budgets are being cut back, the need for innovation, the need to bring products forward quickly, efficiently and productively hasn't subsided; it has accelerated. So that gap is something that our client services team does a really excellent job in servicing and providing value to our customers. In all of those areas - R&D, finance, IT, Business Ops, engineering - our client services teams have worked effectively in this economy to accelerate open innovation at a time when budgets have really come under attack.

Reed: For those SAP folks who are listening to this podcast who would like to explore the possibility of posting a challenge on InnoCentive, what should they do next? How do they become a seeker?

Raepple: First of all, I would recommend getting in contact with either Bob or me because the process of defining a challenge requires at least some experience in practicing open innovation. Our partner, InnoCentive, has a lot of experience helping clients do that.

What is required first is a good explanation of your problem and also what you as a seeker expect from solvers in terms of providing explanations for their solutions. It is important to have a good challenge description, and InnoCentive and SAP can help to create such a good description or specification of your challenge. Next, if you have to sign an agreement with InnoCentive before you are able to post that challenge in the SAP Pavilion, but once you have done that, you are a seeker and are able to search for solutions on the InnoCentive marketplace.

Reed: Bob, I think this is an interesting question about how to qualify challenges and get the best results. Can you give us a sense of what thought and process go into that for SAP folks?

Fucci: Sure, it's another area where our client services team is a real value add in terms of the partnership. Frequently, clients come to us with a really good, thorough first draft of the challenge, but sometimes they just don't. They come forward with ideas in areas where challenges just need to be developed.

Here's an example: we did a workshop at Lilly recently, and out of that workshop we posted 20 challenges. Great work, but even more important, we posted something like 50 potential challenge opportunity areas. These are areas where our company is going to continue to work with Lilly to ferret out the best challenges, the ones that have the best business impact, the ones that are most timely and effective.

I would urge the listeners that if there are areas that are potential areas, don't wait; bring those forward, let's have a good discussion, let's engage high-end services teams early in the process. They're happy to be involved and happy to support, and if they bring value to a more clear focus on some of these potential areas, I think it's time well spent for us.

Reed: Sounds good. A couple of days prior to this taping on the SAP site we actually passed the submission deadline for some of the challenges in the SAP Pavilion. Can you tell us about SAP's experience in the role of the seeker and what you've learned so far?

Raepple: We posted four challenges in the SAP Pavilion and already received a lot of submissions, and we were very happy to see the number of project rooms, which translates to the number of solvers that were interested in these challenges. As an example, we saw more than 1,200 open project rooms on the challenge that I mentioned earlier that asked how to apply these new concepts of social networking and social media into the area of Enterprise Application. From these 1,200 open project rooms that told us they were interested, more than 54 submitted solutions to this challenge.

You can imagine that it is a little bit tough for just one person to review all these documents and the high number of new ideas; for that reason, we spread the work a little bit within SAP so there was actually more than just one team involved in reviewing all these solutions. We set some criteria internally to rate the different solutions and came up with a short list of preferred solutions. In the end, we also involved our senior management to get their opinion on the finalists.

Last but not least, on the specific challenge that asked for social networking on Enterprise Application, we did not select one winner, but in this case, we selected three winners. That's also one possible option, that you nominate not just a single winner, but three in this case. We thought that three solutions were winning the prize award.

Reed: Sounds like we're off and running. Bob, there are obviously some interesting and compelling awards to get involved with in this community on the solver side, from the SDN points to prize money possibilities to increased visibility in the community. I wonder if you have any closing tips or advice for new solvers in terms of the best characteristics you've seen so far?

Fucci: The first thing is that we would encourage solvers to register and be able to get detailed looks at the challenges that are posted on the web site - that's important. We're also doing a lot of work within client services to do solver outreach, to provide some education, provide some highlights of successful solvers and some of the things that just increase learning and adoption for our solver community.

Lastly, there's nothing like success that breeds more and more activity within our platform. We solve a pretty high percentage of challenges that are posted: over 40%. That's a very high percentage, and we keep very detailed records of both the demographics, the areas of expertise, the geography of all of our solvers so that we continue to support them, to get value to them so they're more and more motivated to solve challenges on the InnoCentive web site.

It's a work in process, it's something that we're committed to, it's something that with SAP's help, we've felt like we're doing better work because of the partnership.

Reed: We've covered some good ground with you both today. Thanks for joining us today from Waldorf and giving our listeners an inside view of the opportunities at InnoCentive. Before we sign off, I do want to make sure that our listeners know how to access InnoCentive. If you're not yet registered with SAP's online communities, such as the SAP Developer Network, the BPX Community and the Business Objects community, you can register for all of these at one time.

Once you have access to these online communities, you can access InnoCentive by clicking on the "InnoCentive" tab running on the top of all pages toward the right-hand side. On that note, I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this SAP community podcast. With that, this is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you soon at BPX.SAP.com.