Young Innovator's Day: Where passion met innovation!

There is no dearth of creativity when it comes to allowing young minds to think out of the box. Having never explored such an avenue with kids, we faced a welcome challenge to put together the first edition of the Young Innovators Day at SAP Labs India. We, as a family, have grown over the last few years through a family day or a children’s day but to realize the bigger responsibility of unearthing the next Jobs or Gates requires an even deeper commitment. We feel proud to have employees who help the world run better with their code, it is a pleasure to work with employees who have pledged their trust to this brand, and who better than their own kids to engage with for a day to create awareness on entrepreneurship and being innovative.

Shraddhanjali Rao’s opening keynote was candid and relatable to the kids as well as to us. She stressed that every child is different and the path to being an adult enriches us with experiences that define us. The learning about how a leader has reached the pinnacle of HR of the Best Place to Work for in the country was something that we all were looking forward to. The expectations are never low and she took us through the generic ambitions of seeing a kid become a doctor or an engineer to the unchartered dreams of being a VP and HR Head of SAP in India. While highlighting the importance of technology, we explored the beneficial effect on creating professions that didn’t exist a decade back. We clearly are living in an era where technology can drive a young mind to achieve humungous landmarks and we were glad to have Mohit Kanoria (Co-Founder and Head of Technology at Inversation), who inspired all of us through his own pathway to founding two separate companies at a tender age of 24. We often hear stories about prodigies and here we were witnessing a speaker who had his first business in standard 8th in the form of a gaming cybercafé. SAP boasts about homegrown talents and this journey lifted the spirits of our young crowd who were intrigued to know about how he had managed to achieve so much while still being at school.

Our engagement over the years has done wonders to multiple age groups but this was a completely untouched territory. A few shout outs to the young set of speakers, whom themselves a decade back were filling the same shoes as our audience, prepared great content for the younger ones when their turn came.

Passion and energy are often considered contagious and it truly had flown both ways where an energetic audience met a spirited set of speakers and took us through the sessions of cloud (by Suman De, Developer and Solution Architect at SAP), Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (by Harshit Joshi, Developer at SAP, and Sundeep G, Data Scientist at SAP) and Design Thinking (by MD Afsar Hussain, Developer at SAP). It was a great experience personally to share and learn from the young and vibrant audience. It was lovely to see the early talent speakers come out of their comfort zone and deliver their content where we had no clue what to expect from a child still being in the age group of 12 and 16. And not just that, we were lucky to have some even younger ones aged 9 or 10 join their elder brothers or sister and it was a fabulous show by our speakers to even keep them engaged. Not just the children, but even the rest of us enjoyed being part of a journey to the “Innovation High School” which had multiple checkpoints that the young innovators had to cross before reaching the school and graduating as part of the process.

Any day dedicated to innovation would be left incomplete without the addition of a session to pitch ideas and our final juncture of the event had the future entrepreneurs work on burning problems like corruption, data security, water crisis and pitch their solutions as part of an organization. Where we expected most teams to take up waste management or social awareness, a bigger share of teams preferred solving corruption which highlighted the current state of awareness in our children today. The cherry on top was to have their parents supporting them during the pitch which worked as an added motivation for the children. It proved to be a day where some learned about the latest technologies, some inherited the passion to dream bigger and be future entrepreneurs, and for some, it went a long way to highlight their parents the overflowing potential and capabilities of their young ones.

We feel proud to have an exciting group comprising of scholars and early-talents, who put forward a very well-organized event which even saw them serve food to the kids, which showed the sense of belonging them. Although being core planners for the event, not many of them had much experience with so many children of that age group. While putting together an event that was jam-packed with teaching the young ones, we found ourselves learning so much more from them. One of them went a step forward to admit that this felt more like a family event where the elder ones take responsibility for the next-gen that follows them. The flamboyant presence of Aditi D’Souza (HRBP Consultant, SAP) as the host for the event made it even more interesting for the children as they were engaged with the flow set for them.

We all learn from our daily schedule but none of us expected taking back so much from these young ignited minds. Where generic sessions become monologues, we witnessed a bright set of 81 interacts with us on a long journey of more than 6 hours with continuity. Preparations of such events can often be hectic but to see all leave the venue with a smile that cannot be explained tells a lot about the experience that we all had. It was a day without limitations which saw the emergence of a group that would lead us to the future. From being a session that promised a lot about giving back, we concluded with the heart of taking back a lot more than we could have imagined through these young bright minds of tomorrow!