A year ago, I landed in Bangalore, India – not just for a visit, but to live. I had eight suitcases with me, mostly full of what turned out to be the wrong clothes and shoes, and the name and phone number of a woman who supposedly had an apartment I could live in for a while.

A few weeks earlier my boss had asked me if I would be willing to move to India to be Director of a new R&D Lab – Accenture's fourth. I jumped at the opportunity. Accenture Technology Labs, our technology research and development organization, has been turning technology innovation into business results for 20 years. Plus, things were seeming a little sleepy in California and I'd heard how things were hopping in Bangalore.

Fast forward one year, and I can attest that things don't just hop here in India, they leap. Bangalore is an inspirational place to work and makes me feel alive 24/7.

Accenture's shiny new R&D building is complete and home to our first 30 researchers. Together we've already invented some extremely cool new technology, filed a number of patents, and begun deploying new solutions to clients around the world. By the end of the summer we'll increase to 50 employees.

It's exciting to work with this team of highly skilled software engineers, researchers and project managers who, like me, get excited by the potential of technology. We're doing high-value work – a shift from the call centers and technology delivery centers for which India is more generally known. Our job is to develop and pilot new innovations for and with our India Delivery Center, and then to roll out these unique innovations to Accenture globally. All in the spirit of helping our clients leverage emerging technologies from across the marketplace to drive business performance.

Right now, we're focused on tackling some of the toughest issues in global IT delivery – helping accelerate the maturity of Accenture's capabilities in a client service model that is still relatively young across the industry.

For example, one of the tools we're testing aims to improve knowledge management in applications outsourcing and maintenance. It's called the Repository Navigation Tool and it enables large software projects to perform traceability and impact analysis by finding inter-relationships among the large number of documents in a software project repository.

A couple of our other projects focus on increasing the effectiveness and productivity of globally dispersed project teams.

• Virtual Collaborative Software Design is like a next-generation video conference that allows colleagues in different locations to see eye-to-eye while sharing virtual work objects – key to enabling precise interpersonal communication between geographically dispersed teams working on complex software design.
  
  
• Our Global Communications Accelerator provides a toolset that enhances teamwork and communication between remote project teams by simplifying and structuring communication channels, building context around artifacts and issues through media capture and enhancing team member relationships by creating a better sense of community. The project is currently being piloted with multiple client teams across Accenture's Delivery Center Network.