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Dear all,

I’d like to share with you the 1st stop of Impactathon event in Brazil last Friday – May 8th.  SAP University Alliances together with SAP CSR and DTV(Design thinking volunteer) actively supported Net Impact project team to successfully facilitate this event.

An Impactathon is a one-day challenge that encourages teams of students to generate creative solutions to a local social issue through an abridged design thinking framework. Each Impactathon is part of a global series of 12 events. Brazil is last stop of this series events over global. It attracted 70 students from different universities to attend in person. They are Brazilian students from local. The challenge of the whole day is:  How might we design new ways to support young people to pursue entrepreneurship to improve their lives, their communities, and the world? All the students were divided into 10 teams to work through the design thinking process to come up with new solutions to this challenge and present them to the panel of judges. The solutions will be judged on potential for positive impact, innovation, feasibility, and potential to scale.

Besides students, 5 SAP volunteers (5 from DT), also participated for the whole day to act as DT coach or coordinator of the event. 3 experts from local NGOs served as interviewees for all the teams. And finally, the panel of judges consist of 3 of the experts from NGO,1 DT coach and 1 CSR person from SAP. They watched all the pitches and determine the winning team after deliberation.

Specially thanks to SAP colleagues Alison Cardoso; Adam Altenhofen; Ana Monção; Augusto Loureiro; Camila Soares; Daniel Duarte; Filipe Rollof; Felipe Stumpf; Jacqueline Becker; Raul Belina; Renata Federizzi and Ronald Becker to sacrifice their leisure time in supporting this event.

Students arrived event venue by themselves. They were assigned to separate teams named after a kind of fruit when they registered outside the room. All these students are from different schools, different majors and different grades. But there was no hold back for them to communicate with others. They enjoyed the coffee break and actively exchange with each other.

Event officially started from 9:00am, Greg Francis, experienced trainer from Net Impact firstly introduced the mission and vision of the series events, and an overview of Design Thinking. After we had the SAP Overview with Daniel Duarte. He talked about SAP and our LABS. Later the “Ice Break” exercise that everyone to introduce himself/herself and favorite food in short, all the teams started to review design challenge of the day and identify personas. Every team owned a “Graffiti wall” to put their ideas, and they shared a chance to interview experts from NGOs in a certain period. 

After a quick lunch, teams back to continue the challenge with “Ideation” phase. Followed by “Prototyping” that everyone were inspired by “the marshmallow challenge”, and were excited to work out their solution to the challenge. With the support from DT coach, each team finalized their own prototype with the information they collected from the interviewees.

All teams presented their prototype to the panel of judges one by one.  After the deliberation, judges announced that team Banana is the winning team of Impactathon Brazil. Their work will compete with others from Impactathon events all over the world, the final winning team will be endorsed to Seattle, USA later this year.