SAP holds Research & Innovation Award in India

MUMBAI, INDIA: SAP Research, the global research unit of SAP and SAP Labs India, jointly announced their first SAP Research and Innovation Award in India for funding research projects at leading Indian universities and research institutes.

This initiative seeks to establish collaboration between Indian academics and SAP’s research and development departments. As part of the awards program, five successful projects that were selected in a highly competitive process will be awarded a research grant of Rs 11,00,000 for a project duration of 12 months. The winners will also get an opportunity to collaborate on an ongoing basis with SAP Research and its partners following the end of the sponsored projects.

Kush Desai, MD, SAP Labs India opined, “An industry-academia partnership seeds such opportunities and both bodies stand to gain tremendously from this symbiotic relationship. SAP has established formidable alliances with some of the best academic institutions in India and will continue to sustain these long-term engagements. With SAP Research and Innovation awards, we are further encouraging co-innovation and fruition of new ideas in the Indian IT ecosystem.”

SAP Research and SAP Labs India invited entries on contemporary and relevant research topics, including advanced web technologies; real-world awareness; real-time enterprise transparency; future manufacturing; next generation enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture; service ecosystems; security and trust; technologies for emerging economies; end-to-end simplicity; business-centric networks and industrialization of software development.

Prof Sanjay Kumar of Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur commented, “We are grateful to SAP Research for providing us with a platform for incubating our ideas into business projects. We are excited to work with researchers at SAP Labs India, as this will foster sharing of best practices among the industry and the academia, a quintessential element that ensures success in innovation.”

The selection process involved an initial round of online submission of a project brief, while in the second round, the contenders with the most promising proposals were required to submit a full-fledged project proposal. Post this, the third selection round witnessed eight short-listed candidates presenting their projects with stipulated 12-month duration at SAP Labs India to a committee of SAP Research experts.