Max is the Vice President of Innovation Strategy at SAP, the world’s leader in enterprise applications. In addition to his responsibilities at SAP, Max serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council, where he applies his research to understanding the future of consumer industries. Max frequently collaborates with the Forum for Growth and Innovation, Clayton Christensen’s think thank, where he served as a senior research fellow. Max often writes and speaks on the subject of innovation theory. His work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bloomberg Business Week, and Business Insider. He maintains an online column with the Harvard Business Review where you can see what he is currently focused. He also frequently tweets important pieces he sees on Twitter@Maxwellelliot.

http://maxwellwessel.com/

It’s hard to overstate just how complex SAP’s product is, and furthermore it’s implemented differently everywhere it’s used! On the show, Max discussed innovation in an environment like this. The process focuses, he says, on simplicity – innovation means putting something on top of the incredibly complex product, such that more and smaller customers can implement the core product simply and easily, and configure it to their needs, making the same results delivered to Fortune 500 companies available to small businesses. He spoke about how while it may seem that SAP’s innovation strategy is the opposite of the “deliver slightly less, for less, with rapidly developing capability” mentality of disruption, they don’t see it as such. SAP is all about entering new markets and disrupting the incumbents by leveraging some core capability of SAP in order to do the task better and cheaper.