SAP, the enterprise software company, sponsored Trinity College Dublin’s participation in this year’s session of Stanford’s prestigious ME310 Design Innovation course. ME310 is the gold standard course in industrial design and Trinity joined an elite international group of universities for this year’s programme. Four TCD graduates partnered with four Stanford engineering students on a design innovation challenge defined by SAP. The focus was on SAP’s AppHaus innovation space and how remote collaboration between teams can be achieved using the latest in technology and design thinking. The AppHaus concept is itself inspired by Stanford’s influential 'd.school' and represents the latest in innovative workspaces. SAP opened its first large-scale implementation in Dublin in early 2012 and is now converting a number of buildings on its Mountain View campus. The Dublin and Silicon Valley teams collaborate closely and the students were tasked with looking at how to shrink the distance between the locations. Dr Tony O’Donnell of SAP Ireland said he was “delighted” when he gave Trinity the good news, adding that he was looking forward to seeing the students’ work. “I’m absolutely thrilled that SAP has selected Trinity’s Schools of Engineering and Computer Science for this year’s run of ME310. We only sponsor one university globally in any given year and it’s a great affirmation of TCD’s international reputation that we’ve selected them. “It’s also a big endorsement for the innovation and creativity that we experience every day in the AppHaus and we’re looking forward to seeing how the students can make us collaborate better across distances,” he added. The ME310 course places students in a ‘real world’ design dialogue with a corporate partner and, by the end of the course, they deliver a bespoke, innovative solution or process for that company. “Trinity’s engineers and computer scientists are as good as the best in the world,” said Prof Gareth Bennet, who headed up the ME310 teaching team for Trinity with Profs Margaret O’Mahony, Kevin Kelly and Mike Brady, along with teaching assistant Donal Holland. “An invitation to collaborate directly with Stanford’s School of Engineering and to be part of its Global Network of Elite Universities is testament to this fact,” he continued. “Trinity’s leading reputation in design excellence delivers graduates who can both pioneer new companies to create indigenous employment and help reinvent existing companies to make them more competitive.”