Business POV

Mr. Plattner former, chairman of the software giant was speaking at a conference as part of an event called the "Strategy Conference," put on by the Institute of Design at IIT. The topic was about innovation, research and reinvention. We pulled selected philosophical fragments from his 50-minute presentation. The entire presentation can be found here.

Today, tens of thousands of companies rely on SAP to provide the stable systems that run their mission-critical processes. At the same time, they expect these systems to keep up with the speed of business innovation - and indeed, in many cases, be the primary driver of innovation.

Plattner was chairman of the board at SAP until 2003 and is currently the chairman of the supervisory board. Since his retirement from SAP Plattner has been particularly active as a benefactor in the fields of technological research and education. In 1998 Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute for software systems engineering based at the University of Potsdam, and in 2005, with a donation of $35 million, Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University.