Accenture Technology Labs, the technology Research and Development (R&D) organization within Accenture, is at the intersection of business and technology.

Located in Sophia Antipolis (France), Bangalore (India), Chicago (Illinois) and San José (California), the Labs turn technology innovation into business performance for Accenture and our clients. How? Our R&D professionals continually seek to understand next-wave technologies and their impact on business.

• Our Research group creates visions of the future by using new technologies in innovative ways, illustrating how emerging technologies will have a significant impact on our clients' businesses in the next three to five years.
  
  
• Our Development group explores promising new technology solutions that are currently available, but are still one to three years away from widespread adoption, using them to create state-of-the-art business applications for clients.

Based on their technology R&D, the Labs are also responsible for developing Accenture’s technology vision.

In Sophia Antipolis, Accenture Technology Labs conducts R&D in the following areas:

• Analytics and insight: Focuses on improving businesses' ability to access, analyze and act upon business intelligence in the emerging real-time economy. Our R&D explores how leading-edge insight techniques, such as predictive monitoring and smart grid, could be used as the next key to competitive advantage.
  
  
• Human-computer interaction: Examines how emerging devices and technologies such as Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications can help further enhance the effectiveness of the workforce and includes the areas of collaboration, interaction and visualization. Our R&D looks at new technologies such as the Interactive Wall application, a very large, high-resolution interactive screen that puts vast amounts of information at peoples' fingertips, helping them see the "big picture".
  
  
• Infrastructure: Investigates how IT infrastructures are evolving towards utility computing, as bandwidth, computing capacity and storage can now be delivered virtually, as needed. Furthermore, it assesses how corporations can take advantage of such commodity services from third-party vendors who can, through economies of scale, provide them more cheaply and reliably than their own IT shop. Our latest research looks specifically at the emerging trends of Cloud Computing, next generation data centers, green computing and biometrics.
  
  
• Mobility and Sensors: Focuses on the use of mobile devices in the enterprise. We are leaders in near-field communication, a technology that dramatically expands the usefulness of the near-ubiquitous mobile phone. Moreover, to help clients capitalize on the opportunities of mobility, the Labs is investigating ways to equip objects and environments with miniaturized sensors, tagging technologies and communications.
  
  
• Next-generation branch: The innovative next-generation branch draws on Accenture’s global experience in the banking industry to show how a range of established and cutting-edge technologies might be combined to create a branch that enables the bank to maximize the value of each customer visit.
  
  
• Payments Innovation: Explores the emerging payments market, which is characterized by such innovations as electronic invoicing, contactless payments, prepaid payments, mobile payments, unattended payments, micropayments and bank-to-corporate connectivity. Based on its research into high performance and its extensive experience in helping companies leverage technology to achieve competitive advantage, Accenture has created the Accenture Payments Innovation Showcase.

Each year, about 200 of the world’s largest corporations spend a day at the Labs attending innovation workshops. These sessions offer clients the ideal opportunity to see future technologies, scope ideas or make a new technology work for them. Learn more about our Innovation Workshop.