What does Accenture do? The short answer is simple enough.
“We do everything,” said Ashley Miller, director of Accenture’s San Francisco Innovation Hub.
The longer answer: Accenture is a consulting firm that helps its clients innovate faster than they could alone. They work with plenty of big-name organizations — from Twitter and Pinterest to the Golden State Warriors — and essentially “augment[s] the skills our clients don’t have,” Miller said.
The Warriors, for instance, don’t have a lot of quantum computing expertise on staff. (Understandably.) So the team at Accenture’s San Francisco Innovation Hub — one of 11 such hubs around the country — stays abreast of the latest quantum technology, updating the basketball team on how it could improve its analytics or its app.
Accenture’s focus extends beyond technology implementation, too. The hub offers what Miller calls “innovation architecture” — a team that can handle the entire lifecycle of innovation, from researching and strategizing to 3D-printing prototypes. At a moment’s notice, the house specialists can mock up a VR experience or a smart pillow. (Yes, that’s a real thing; we saw one with our own eyes.)
So, what’s it like to innovate at Accenture? Built In toured their space to get the inside scoop.
THE LOCATION
Accenture’s 120,000-square-foot office spans five floors in Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco. Located in the East Cut, the building is “iconic,” says Zoey Farooq, Accenture’s West Media Lead.
It’s no coincidence Accenture chose to open an office here, either. It’s close to many of their clients, first and foremost among the Salesforce. (The company is Salesforce’s top implementation partner.) The surrounding area is studded with Accenture partners, too, including LinkedIn and Twitter.
THE PEOPLE
Globally, Accenture employs about half a million people, and in the Bay Area alone they have about 2,000 employees. The San Francisco Innovation Hub itself has a team of about 200 tech specialists, and Accenture has plans to expand that headcount to 500 in 2020. Current team members work primarily in in-demand fields like engineering, R&D, design and data science.
“Data scientists are incredibly expensive, and very limited,” Miller explained. “There’s a hiring shortage.”
Last year, in fact, LinkedIn reported that more than 150,000 data scientist jobs were unfilled nationwide. The shortage was especially severe in San Francisco.
This is exactly why the Hub matters — it means Accenture clients don’t have to laboriously hire these types of professionals. Instead, Accenture furnishes them with on-demand tech professionals for key projects.
THE OFFICE
This isn’t a traditional office. Though the Hub has a full-time team, it’s primarily a drop-in resource for consultants across the Bay Area. Though historically, they’ve worked out of their clients’ offices, now they can also bring clients into the Hub and show them firsthand what emerging technology can do. (Accenture prototypes new products in-house, and gets new products from major tech firms like Microsoft before they hit the market.)
Consultants can also stop by solo to learn about new technological frontiers. Collaboration and education are core values here, and it shows in the space, which boasts an open layout and a theater for group virtual reality experiences. Here are some highlights from our recent tour:
The indoor forest
A video screen runs vertically up Accenture’s stairwell, playing footage that looks, at first glance, like a still image of a forest. It’s actually moving footage of redwood trees in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, though, comprised of “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of images [from] drones circling around,” Miller said. Look closely, and you can see the tree branches move in the wind. In rainy footage, you can even spot falling droplets.
“We’re bringing the outdoors in,” Miller said — a move that research suggests can boost employee productivity and well-being.
The collaboration-conducive layout
Rumor has it that the Hub is “the most connected office space this side of the Mississippi,” Miller said — that’s thanks primarily to the airy, atrium-like stairwell that connects all five floors. Fire code recommends a maximum of two connected floors in an office, but that didn’t stop Accenture’s designers. They created an elaborate wrap-around firewall to encase the stairs, which allows for unplanned encounters between Accenture’s various teams — a key element in interdepartmental collaboration.
The office’s open layout encourages teamwork, too.“There aren’t very many doors,” Miller notes. This allows for spontaneous group discussions. The chatter might sound distracting, but voices barely carry in the office, thanks speakers in the ceilings playing constant, barely-perceptible white noise.
The 360-degree virtual reality theater
In an age of social media, virtual reality is oddly antisocial: a hyper-personal experience that a single individual shares with a lone headset. In this circular theater, though, that changes. Anyone wearing a VR headset can project what they’re seeing on the 360-degree screen.
Right now, Accenture’s teams actually work intensively with an “extended reality” headset: Hololens 2, which hasn’t yet been released. Unlike virtual reality headsets, the wearable still allows you to see what’s in front of you — it just overlays it with a feed of digital context. If you were interviewing someone for a job, for instance, the Hololens 2 would let you pull up the candidate’s LinkedIn alongside their face. It’s akin to Google Glass, but designed for work settings where employees need their hands, like assembly lines, rather than for personal life.
The ability to project the Hololens 2 experience has been a boon to UX research teams here, as well as to the Hub’s overarching educational mission. It lets engineers and designers assess how users interact with the technology; it also lets consultants show their clients the headset’s wide range of potential applications. The theater can even help football teams walk through play simulations once they’ve run out of practice time for the day, as above.
The California energy
Accenture has operated in the Bay Area since about 1950, and in the office design, they tried to capture “the essence of California,” Miller said — particularly the nature. It’s not just video trees. In the cafeteria and assorted other spots, walls crawl with live tendrils of greenery. Miller calls these “living walls.” The color scheme of the workspaces, too, echoes local biomes. Clusters of desks are decorated in redwood-esque oranges and browns, or greens reminiscent of the Muir woods.
The portal into the fourth dimension
In Accenture’s Maker Space, a fishbone-shaped array of desks covered in 3D printers and prototypes, a team works on not just 3D printing, but the next frontier: 4D printing. At first, 4D-printed objects look like simple 3D printed objects, but they’re designed to collapse in specific ways when exposed to stresses like heat.
As simple as this sounds, it could have major implications for everything from furniture shipping to pasta making. A flat rectangle could collapse, when heated, into a functioning couch. Normal noodles, when cooked, could morph into alphabet soup — or little realistically-cratered moons.
Clients often visit the Innovation Hub for a sense of what’s next for tech, and based on our visit, it’s no less than a new dimension. Get ready.
