Accenture's Bengaluru hub is helping them bag big-dollar contracts

Accenture has begun to originate millions of dollars of new contracts from its innovation hub in Bengaluru, as a strategy to move towards providing new services at scale has taken off.

The IT giant has opened 4,00,000 sq ft centre last year to showcase its innovations to global clients. The centre receives as many as eight global client visits a week.

“We have innovation-led originations. We’ve held over 120 co-innovations workshops. The results have exceeded our expectations,” Mohan Sekhar, senior managing director, Accenture Technology Services, said.

When asked whether the amount of deals originated from the centre was in the ‘tens of millions’ Sekhar agreed but declined to specify the dollar amount of new work generated. “We had an oil-and-gas major come and visit the centre the day after it was launched. The group CIO came and then his team visited. And now we have a project on blockchain with them.”

Read: Accenture steps up innovation in India, takes clients on a bus

He added that Accenture was also seeing significant impact from the innovations contests being run in the company. In the first year, the contest received about 2,000 ideas from about 4,000 employees. In the current fourth iteration of the contest, the company received over 40,000 ideas from 60,000 employees.

“About 1,000 ideas will get deployed in client locations. The idea is to move to innovation-at-scale,” Sekhar said.

The company has already included innovation as a metric on which it rewards its senior executives and most contracts come with innovation clauses. The company has since imbedded innovation leads in all its projects to drive that aspect of the business.

Large projects – with a few hundred employees – also have automation leads to deliver on the need to optimise work as well.

As part of the innovation strategy, the company is focusing on building specialisations, with architects for different offerings such as data, blockchain and automation. Sekhar added that company was phasing out the role of pure, generic managers.