The power of convergence: MIT and Accenture take their relationship to the next level

It’s impossible to ignore the accelerating pace of convergence between technologies, products and services. It’s reshaping all our lives by creating new experiences and value. So what do we mean by convergence? It is defined as two or more industries’ products or services becoming, from a customer’s perspective, either complementary (dependent) or competitive (overlapping).

Launching the Convergence Initiative

MIT and Accenture have been collaborating across education, research and thought leadership for 15 years. It’s been a rich and mutually beneficial relationship, engaging more than 100 eminent leaders and technologists from MIT and many thousands of my colleagues at Accenture.

This provides a wonderful foundation for the next phase of our relationship. While we’ve collaborated in different areas over the years, many of these have been relatively independent projects. Last week, we were excited to launch the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology that will draw faculty, researchers and student across MIT to work with our technology, industry and strategy experts.

Collaboration and convergence are in many ways two sides of the same coin. It’s all about bringing the right ingredients together to make things happen – whether that’s optimizing human+machine collaboration, getting the most from diverse datasets to scale AI, analytics and automation, or combining technical and business insight to enable new levels of performance. All of these and more are right at the heart of our new initiative. There’s real chemistry between our two organizations and that means together we can be greater than the sum of our parts. So what do we both bring to the table?

A unique combination of strengths

Accenture has co-creation as a central strand of its DNA. It’s natural for us to collaborate and it’s how we get outcomes for our clients, businesses and the world at large. MIT’s outstanding track-record of world-leading research and breakthrough innovation, with 95 Nobel laureates and counting, is discovering tomorrow’s technologies today. And it’s this combination that sits at the heart of our new initiative. For the first time, we bring all our respective strengths together under one powerful alliance to explore the real world value and commercial implications of new technologies.

We’ll focus on both near- and long-term research projects addressing industry and technology convergence. These will include working on potentially transformative areas like the convergence between AI and healthcare, with the potential to change forever how research is carried out and patients are treated. Other priorities for research include data lineage and tracing. And of course, many other topics, where the insights will be developed and presented at global forums

Educating, transforming and inspiring

There’s also a strong learning element to the convergence initiative. We’re going to be looking at how we can scale learning to benefit people at Accenture, explore new areas like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, 3D printing, robotics, 5G and more, to educate, transform and inspire. We want to bring leading education not just to benefit our people, but to better equip industry and business leaders. Understanding the parlance of technologies and their adaptation to business has never been more critical for leaders as they strive to bring about cultural change, instilling confidence and empowering their workforce. In this increasingly converging world, technology acumen is simply a must-have capability, every bit as important as strategic and financial insight to support future waves of change.

We know that the best ideas happen when fresh voices are given the chance to speak and be heard. And a joint commitment to inclusion and diversity will permeate everything we do together. That’s the way to trigger real change in mindsets, organizations and society. That’s all for now. You can find out more about our convergence initiative here. Thanks for reading and watch this space.