Author's note (May 2026): I wrote this in November 2018, after the second SAP Innomarathon. We didn't win. And yet, it was one of the most formative experiences of those years. I'm sharing it because educational failure rarely gets documented — only the wins make it to the blog.

SAP Innomarathon: What I Learned Competing Twice Without Winning

What SAP Innomarathon is and why it matters

SAP Innomarathon is SAP's open innovation program in Latin America. It's not a 48-hour hackathon — it's a structured competition that looks for startups capable of using emerging technologies (AI, IoT, Blockchain, machine learning) to solve problems aligned with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

The bar is corporate: evaluators are SAP engineers and architects who know exactly what a real enterprise integration looks like versus an empty demo. There's no room for smoke and mirrors.

For us, SAP Innomarathon represented the natural bridge between what we had built — a social impact tool — and the world-class enterprise technology ecosystem. If TALS was going to scale beyond pilot projects, it needed to demonstrate it could operate in corporate environments. SAP was the perfect proving ground.

Why bring TALS to SAP

The logic wasn't obvious at first. TALS is a sign language translator. SAP is enterprise management software. What do they have to do with each other?

The connection was real: large companies have deaf employees, deaf customers, suppliers with hearing disabilities. Their HR, customer service and internal communication systems had no modules to manage those interactions inclusively. We could be that module.

How do companies report their inclusion KPIs if they have no tools to communicate with their deaf employees? How do they manage an inclusive onboarding process? How does a retail chain serve a deaf customer?

TALS could be the accessibility layer that SAP's stack was missing.

The first time: 2017 — arriving without knowing what to expect

The first edition was a culture shock.

We arrived at the Demo Day with a lot of technical passion and very little corporate structure. Our competitors were agritech and fintech startups with polished decks, detailed business models and, in several cases, already partially integrated with the SAP ecosystem.

The judges interrogated us on integration: "How does this connect to SAP HCM?", "Do you have a connector for SAP S/4HANA?", "Have you worked with SAP BAPIs or IDocs?"

We couldn't answer those questions well at that point. We knew how to make gesture detection work — we knew nothing about SAP's integration language.

That question — "How does this connect to SAP's core?" — which we couldn't answer correctly in 2017, was the seed of my current career in Portugal working with industrial technology and SAP.

The second time: 2018 — returning knowing more

In 2018 we returned with a different proposal.

During the intervening year, we had studied SAP's architecture: the APIs, the relevant modules (HCM for human resources, C/4HANA for customer service), the integration standards. We reformulated the TALS pitch not as "a sign language translator" but as "the communicative accessibility module that SAP's stack is missing for companies with deaf employees and customers."

The demo was more technical: we showed how TALS data — transcriptions of sign language conversations — could feed an interaction log in a CRM dashboard. It was a significant step forward from the year before.

But the central obstacle remained: TALS was a hardware-intensive system. It required a physical camera, a dedicated device, per-user calibration. SAP is, by definition, software that runs in the cloud and in browsers. The friction between our product model and SAP's distribution model was structural, not technical.

Why we didn't win: the honest analysis

We didn't win because we couldn't demonstrate immediate commercial scalability within SAP's customer ecosystem in Chile.

In the Innomarathon context, "winning" required convincing the jury that in 12-18 months your solution could be deployed in production in companies the size of SAP users — multinationals with IT departments, validation processes, annual software budgets and 12-month procurement cycles.

TALS was excellent for the problem it solved. But the operational maturity to be a "commercial SAP partner" in 2018 wasn't there. We lacked support structure, technical integration documentation, SAP certifications, and above all: corporate customer references validating the product in real production.

That's not an excuse — it's an honest diagnosis of where we were.

What we did win

The Innomarathon gave us something that wasn't in the prize:

The language of corporate success. I learned terms I use daily today: ERP, HCM, KPIs, SLAs, ARR, TCO. More importantly than the acronyms, I learned the logic of how large companies make software purchasing decisions: always in terms of return on investment, risk reduction, and regulatory compliance — never purely on "social impact."

Understanding how to position social impact in a corporate context. Three keys I learned in those two Innomarathons:

1. Translate impact into metrics the company understands (hours-per-person saved, reduction in complaints, compliance with inclusion regulations)
2. Integration isn't an extra feature — it's the central value proposition in enterprise context
3. Don't ask for charity or a "social business opportunity": ask for a business opportunity based on measurable results

Connections in the SAP Chile ecosystem that years later would become relevant for the work I do today in Portugal.

The long-term effect: closing the circle

I'm writing this in 2018. Today, in 2026, I'm in Portugal studying to certify in SAP modules — specifically those relevant to industry and production — while working on the digital transformation of SYSteel Group.

The circle that began to take shape in 2017 in Santiago when a judge asked "how does this connect to SAP?" took eight years to complete. But it completed.

Learning paths aren't linear. What looks like failure in the moment can be exactly the map of the next chapter.

Competing twice in SAP Innomarathon without winning was the price I paid for understanding the language of the major leagues. That price, seen from today, was an investment with extraordinary returns.