SAP has plans to open a SAP Innovation Center by the end of 2014, focusing on delivering innovations around smart cities, Industry 4.0, healthcare and digital consumers.
The SAP Innovation Center aims to foster local economic opportunities by identifying untapped market and customer needs and creating new innovative, user-centric products.
This involves co-innovation with SAP customers and partners as well as research collaboration with local universities.
Also, the center will provide local startups with the latest technologies and offer market access to expand their reach.
“As we embrace a networked, technology-driven innovative economy, we will focus on accelerating industry growth in public services, healthcare, financial services and retail,” said Adaire Fox-Martin, president of SAP Asia Pacific Japan.
SAP is also tapping on the increasingly vibrant IT ecosystem across the region to identify ideas at an early stage and leverage access to a large pool of the brightest young talent.
Under the SAP University Alliances Student Entrepreneurship program, students can develop new solutions across SAP’s technologies leveraging in-memory platform SAP HANA, the SAP Mobile Platform and analytics capabilities.
Students will gain access to these technologies, SAP experts, mentors and an entrepreneurship curriculum. Launched globally in March, the program was recently announced in Australia, Singapore and India and will be introduced in Japan and Korea later this year.
The SAP University Alliances program opens up the world of SAP to more than 1,800 universities in more than 80 countries worldwide, and aims to develop highly qualified graduates with critical skills for the 21st century workforce. Annually, over 2,000 tertiary students in Singapore benefit from this program.
Further, through a Young Thinkers program, SAP is also expanding its university partnerships to stimulate interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) in youths, address the gap in skills shortage and encourage entrepreneurial thinking.