Accenture Awards 11 Research Grants to Leading Universities Around the World

Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company has awarded 11 research grants to top universities around the world to significantly broaden and deepen the relationships between Accenture's technology research and development (R&D) groups and leading university researchers.

The grant program helps to support the ground-breaking efforts of leading university research teams, which will be invited to work in collaboration with researchers from the Accenture Technology Labs on R&D projects that are of strategic importance to the technology industry and Accenture's enterprise clients.

"Universities are a critical source of technical and scientific research that can deliver long-term business benefits for organizations around the world," said Prith Banerjee, Managing Director of Global Technology R&D, Accenture. "We are thrilled that this grant program, in conjunction with the Accenture Open Innovation initiative, will enable Accenture Technology Labs researchers to translate a university's conceptual research – which spans topics from cyber security to 3D printing and cognitive computing – into ideas that can ultimately help solve real business challenges for our enterprise clients."

The grant program is part of the Accenture Open Innovation initiative, in which Accenture functions as a bridgemaker between Accenture's Global 2000 clients and the technology innovation ecosystem, which includes universities, top tier accelerators, start-ups, venture capitalists and corporate R&D labs from around the world. New technology research from Accenture Strategy found that four out of five enterprise respondents reported innovation was within their top three priorities and about one quarter placed innovation as the number one priority for their organization.

"I am delighted that we were amongst a select group of universities around the world to be awarded with a research grant from Accenture," said Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, India Institute of Technology, Bombay. "The combination of IIT Bombay's world renowned Natural Language Processing group with Accenture's global consulting and technology services expertise will result in a mutually enriching experience, enabling us to work together on cutting edge cognitive computing problems."

In addition to the monetary grant, the university researchers will benefit from the perspectives that Accenture Technology Labs researchers have to offer given their direct exposure to the enterprise business contexts in which the research would ultimately be applied. The program provides the opportunity for Accenture and university researchers to combine their expertise, learn from each other and achieve more than either could alone.

"We're pleased to be a recipient of an Accenture grant to help further our research in the area of cognitive computing," said Professor Partha Pratim Talukdar, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. "The opportunity to collaborate with Accenture researchers will provide us with valuable inputs into how our research can help address the real-world challenges of enterprise organizations."

"With cyber security threats rapidly evolving and becoming increasingly complex, we are pleased to have received this grant from Accenture to help us advance the research we're doing in the critical area," said Professor David Bader, Georgia Institute of Technology. "Collaboration with Accenture will provide access to data and expertise that will help us to build proper algorithms, allowing our research to push further and faster than previously possible."