  Mike Redding is global director of development for Accenture Technology Labs, based in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Born and raised in Rochester, New York, Mike’s interest in technology is among his earliest memories, strongly encouraged by his father. “I was three or four, when I was given a robotic Tinman,” he recalls laughing. “It barely lasted a week, sacrificed to the greater goal of learning. Poor guy, he never recovered.”
High school in New York was followed by undergraduate studies at Princeton, where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science. He moved to Northwestern University, Illinois where he received a Masters degree in science, studying biomedical engineering.“I was interested in engineering,” Mike recalls, “and prosthetics were particularly attractive because there is a combination of hardware and software problems to be solved.”
By this time he was convinced that he did not want to pursue an academic career. He wanted to create solutions and see them applied in the community, which drew him to Accenture because of the focus on innovation.
From the start Mike relentlessly pursued new experiences, thriving on the regular change of clients and teams. Early in his career, he worked in Europe because he believes passionately that understanding different cultures is vital to the broad outlook consulting demands.
After seven years working in the Financial Services sector developing imaging and workflow solutions, a subject on which he remains expert, he began to work on e-commerce solutions during the late 1990s. Then, between 2000 and 2003, he undertook the longest engagement of his career at a major US bank and mortgage company developing and implementing a customer interaction strategy.
He took on his current role in January 2005, moving to Sophia Antipolis at the same time. “Working for the Labs has always been special. Our charter is to invent our own future.” Mike says. “The role of my group is to develop business solutions from technologies that are about one to three years from mainstream adoption.”
He identifies one of the Labs’ great strengths as the incremental development of ideas, where every concept is challenged and validated by regular interaction with clients and the industry-focused teams in Accenture. Some ideas succeed, while others are either modified or abandoned.
He is a passionate proponent of the power of interactive and digital marketing, recognizing that the Labs give him the freedom to pursue that passion. He believes the most important technology trend is the extension of Information Technology beyond traditional computers, by taking information access, collection and display, and making it available everywhere.
In addition to his overall global responsibility for development, Mike likes to champion individual projects that show outstanding potential, this year putting his weight behind the interactive wall technology. “I’ve always been an applied guy, from high school onwards,” he says. “What gives me most pleasure is seeing things I have created being used by real people as part of their lives.”
Beyond Accenture, Mike takes every opportunity to travel with his wife and, practical to the end, relaxes by engineering water-gardens, because he “likes getting my hands dirty.”
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