Accenture is harvesting ideas of its employees to boost innovation

Accenture, the leading global professional services company, has decided to rev up its innovation engine in India using ideas from its employee base in the country.

For this, the company has built a proprietary platform, called IdeaHarvester, where employees can submit their ideas from where it is sent to the right people for curation.

During Innovation Summit, a competitive program that started in January 2016, Accenture received 4,000 ideas, and 500 of them have even been implemented, with shortlisted ideas being given an initial funding of $2000 each, so that employees can go ahead and build prototypes for their innovation.

"The program is about cultural change. We need to lead in innovation and all our programs -from Accenture Labs to our initiatives with colleges, employees and customers -are focused on this," Mohan Sekhar, Senior MD, Technology - Delivery Centers for Technology in India, told ET.

"It is not just platforms, we have put in place processes to help improve our innovation activities. And we are seeing an increase in participation. We had nearly double the number of ideas in this year's Innovation Summit," said Raghavan Iyer, MD - Technology.

Not only this, Accenture has also done over 40 Innovation Workshops with its customers where these ideas are presented and thought over.

IT companies are focusing more and more on innovation because of digital processes disrupting the traditional techniques of business. For example, Infosys has a 'zero-distance' program so that it can improve the way it innovates and clients can be given better processes.

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