Figuring out real life application of technologies is the greatest challenge facing consulting company's researchers, writes John Collins

F or a company that does not have any products of its own but instead sends out armies of consultants to implement technology from other vendors for its clients, it may seem surprising that Accenture invests heavily in blue-sky research and development.

On average, the company spends $250 million (€196 million) annually, of which a significant proportion is devoted to its four technology labs around the world. Given that Accenture had revenues of $16.65 billion last year, that's a significantly smaller proportion than most product companies, but still a significant investment in an area that many hard-nosed management consultants might see as fluffy.

And while Accenture's technology labs clearly have to deliver innovations that can be practically applied by their client-facing colleagues, they are not afraid to ponder far out uses of emerging technologies. Dr Martin Illsley, director of Accenture's Technology Labs Europe - which is based in the countryside near Sophia-Antipolis in the south of France (there are two more labs in the US and the most recently opened one in Bangalore, India) - was in Dublin recently to showcase some of the work of his team of researchers.

The European lab broadly specialises in the areas of wireless and mobile, as well as media technologies but Illsley says that, if a researcher in a particular location has a speciality, that will be accommodated.

The projects include a number of technologies for the "smart home", including activity monitoring systems that can tell the difference between an older person lying down for a nap and one that has had a fall.

The same technology could of course be applied in an industrial setting, eg to monitor a baggage handling facility to spot abnormal behaviour among baggage handlers that may indicate theft is taking place.

"Clearly, there are privacy concerns with a system like this," concedes Illsley. "We need to build it so that only the data that is required for the purpose is taken out from the cameras, so you might blur the images in a particular setting."

They are also working on technologies that allow companies to monitor what is being written about them online using software which can automatically assess whether an article is positive, negative or neutral towards that organisation.

Related but different technology analyses what is being written in monitored publications online, something that Illsley feels could be of importance for politicians who want to know what the real issues are in advance of an election.

Illsley says the biggest issue for his researchers is not demonstrating the technologies in the lab and persuading clients of their potential benefit, but figuring out how they would work in the real world.

"We usually put the systems in place before we've put the associated systems to manage them in place," says Illsley.

"Today, if every Fiat was fitted with a black box and had downloadable software that controlled the engine, which is probably not that far away, how would you manage all of that? We don't have those systems today, so the management of new systems is always behind the system itself."

Illsley thinks that clients are now spending more time considering the possible implications of any technology-related product or service because of the potential damage to their reputation of a product recall or similar issue. His point is backed up by the recent issues around Sony batteries in Dell, Apple, Toshiba and Lenovo laptops - even though the risk was small, the companies were willing to take the cost of a massive product recall rather than face the flack if a customer's PC went on fire.

"In a sense it's good to have those lessons," says Illsley.

Given the investment here in PhD students in the last couple of years, Government policymakers will be encouraged to note that Illsley reports that finding suitably qualified researchers in Europe can still be an issue, despite having a state of the art facility near Nice and significant budgets for research.

But he believes that it is the interaction with clients and the fact that researchers see their work implemented by clients that gives Accenture an edge.

"One of the reasons they join Accenture, and the reason I joined is that they want to make something happen," says Illsley. "When I finished academia, I was slightly frustrated because things moved slowly. Then I joined HP, a great company, I was in the labs. There were a lot of good ideas but I didn't quite get that feeling that any of them were going to come to fruition.

"I joined Andersen [ now Accenture] at the time because here's an organisation where, if I have an idea, they will make sure that either it gets shown to be a crap idea or it will get there. And as a researcher that was very attractive."

Some purists may feel that the interaction between economics and research is not always a good thing, but Illsley is unabashed about stressing the importance of that relationship. "It's one of the driving factors for innovation," he says. "We probably wouldn't all have broadband today unless Alcatel had found an economic way to give us ADSL through existing copper.

"Of course, they could go around and give us all fibre in every home, but economically it wasn't viable, so they had to innovate to an extent that made it happen."

In Accenture's case, the researchers may not make the next big product breakthrough, such as finding the replacement for the computer keyboard, but as Illsley says, they will find a practical application for innovations that other companies come up with. He gives the example of the digital pen developed by Nokia and others which Accenture applied to collecting mortgage applications by brokers in the customers' home.

It is less threatening than having a laptop between the broker and the client. The client has a paper form that they can keep, and by connecting the pen to their mobile phone with Bluetooth technology, the broker could get mortgage approval straight away.

"In many ways, research is about asking stupid questions - it's what we do all the time," says Illsley. "On the one hand we've got such big egos anyway that it doesn't bother us. It doesn't bother us to go into a situation as a researcher and ask 'why do you do that?'. And all our researchers are inquisitive by nature anyway. They all want to know how things work, why things do what they do. There's not always a rational axis which annoys people but it is part of what we look for."