New kind of business process driven innovations

Shahi Agassi (SAP) on innovations ahead -

What kind of innovation?
A lot of people talked about the improvements in supply chain--cutting four of five days out of a 16-day process. But you look at innovation in product definition and product design, and you may actually cut three to six months out of a 12-month cycle. The impact on a company is significantly bigger.

Where do you look to see that?
You look at innovation in mergers and acquisitions and post-merger integration, and if you have a better engine to integrate other companies, you may be the integrator versus being integrated into somebody else. These are new areas where we did things in the past on paper or spreadsheets and PowerPoints. We're moving now into a well-defined process that allows me to do it in a predictable and sustainable way across my businesses, across the world--from the design to the launch of a product, from recruiting people to a postmortem on projects, from premerger deal rooms to a postmerger reorganization. There are all these processes that we've never done before.