Cristina Palmaka, president of SAP Latin America and the Caribbean.
By Cristina Palmaka
President of SAP Latin America and the Caribbean
A few years ago I met a person who inspires me a lot: Anna Luiza Beserra, a young Brazilian environmental entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of a startup called Sustainable Development and Water for All (SDW). When she was 15, Anna Luiza invented a portable system that uses solar energy to purify rainwater. The invention solved a serious problem: the lack of clean water and sanitation in some of the driest areas of Brazil.
Whenever I think of Anna Luiza I ask myself, do we know what we are talking about when we talk about innovation? The word usually evokes great geniuses, with access to many resources, who make revolutionary breakthroughs or disruptive changes.
In fact, most of the inventions that ultimately change our lives are ideas like Anna Luiza’s, which arise from an aha moment, a Eureka moment, in which we clearly see a new solution to an everyday problem. SAP started like this too, with “a eureka moment” of 4 German IBM employees. Half a century later (yes, this year we turn 50) is a technological giant and famous for having invented an entire category of the sector, the Corporate resource planning or ERP.
Today, true to our pioneering heritage, we continue to bet on those eureka moments. We have just announced the expansion of SAP Labs Latin America, our research and development center, based for 16 years in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. We have invested 30 million euros to build another building in that complex and are adding 850 people to our staff, which will soon reach 2,000 employees.
In addition, we have opened the first SAP accelerator in the region, the global network of external SAP accelerators. The foundries They provide technical and marketing support to start-ups and integrate them into the SAP ecosystem, where they have access to an instant market of millions of customers.
Why am I so excited to have an accelerator in Latin America? Is simple. The successive crises of recent years (COVID-19, the war in Ukraine) have exposed serious gaps in global supply chains. We are in a global eureka moment e the opportunity for Latin America is enormous.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) estimates that in the short to medium term the region could increase its exports of goods and services by up to $ 78 billion as supply chains begin to shift to become shorter, more resilient, and more sustainable. The IDB sees opportunities in the automotive, textile, pharmaceutical and renewable energy industries, Moreover. With our laboratories and the SAP.iO foundry, I see opportunities everywhere.
The first call will be launched in September 2022 and will focus on one of the most thriving industries in the region: sustainability in agriculture. But this is only the beginning. More calls will come, for more startups, in more sectors. With these resources, it’s only a matter of time before many more Anna Luisa multiply those eureka moments that will ultimately change our lives.
Source: Clarin
