Out of the office into the digital lab

Accenture clients think at the Innovation Center in Garching near Munich, Germany out of the box: The center specifically offers the opportunity to jump-start their own digitalization.

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One of Accenture’s Industry X.0 Innovation Network centers, of which there are 23 around the world, is located in the town of Garching, near Munich in Germany. | Image: Accenture

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The small drinks machine on the conference room table hums, clatters—and then dispenses a can of Andreas Schuler’s favorite soda. He didn’t need to input any information to get his drink: The machine “recognized” him via a camera and downloaded his drink preference from an IIoT cloud. “That’s really good!” says Schuler, an Accenture consultant and the center’s managing director of the Accenture’s Industry X.0 Innovation Center in Garching. He then congratulates the todays workshop participants gathered around the table, who have developed the device over the past two days.

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The small prototype is located in Accenture’s Industry X.0 Innovation Networkcenter, of which there are 23 around the world, in Garching near Munich, Germany. It is the result of a workshop exercise, a test setup on which industry managers and developers can practice developing, testing, and then following up on new digital ideas for solutions and business ventures. They have left their own company behind for two days for this precise purpose and exchanged their own offices for rooms in Accenture’s IIoT Innovation Center in Garching.

The center is located in the middle of an industrial park, inside a real factory building, and extends across two floors: Offices and meeting rooms are upstairs, while the ground floor is like a real shop floor with IIoT test setups that, as Schuler explains, are intended to be touched. The whole thing is quite impressive—but why would a consulting firm like Accenture build an “industrial facility” like this?

New directions in industrial innovation

“Digitalization is increasingly forcing many of our customers to change their way of thinking: Data and services are becoming more important than industrial machinery, and software expertise is gaining significance. Entire branches of industry are changing and moving away from an engineer-driven, product-centered approach toward an increased focus on services and the customer,” Schuler explains. He notes that this transformation is “also and above all” changing areas such as innovation, research, and development—and presenting a challenge for many companies.

“Companies increasingly need to be capable of handling approaches of a type we would typically associate with the world of software startups,” says Matthias Wahrendorff, Managing Director at Accenture Research and Deputy Manager of the center. “Rapid, step-by-step experiments, processes such as rapid prototyping and minimum viable products—which is to say, solutions that are just ‘good enough’—these aspects often represent a real cultural change for industry suppliers.”

Wahrendorff knows what he is talking about. Accenture Research has studied 350 companies around the world to determine how the best of them manage research and development. The results: Especially successful inventors actually link the proven working methods used by experienced industrial companies with new approaches from software startups and open up their own research and development work to third parties, achieving significant cost advantages in the process. And it’s important to note that the vast majority of operations don’t use these best practices yet (see box).

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