Accenture awards research grants to 4 Indian institutions -- IIT-B, IIT-C, BITS, IIS

NEW DELHI: Consulting major Accenture has awarded 11 research grants to top universities across the world, including four in India -- IIT Bombay, IIT Chennai, BITS Pilani and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to promote R&D collaboration and innovation.

The grant programme helps support the efforts of leading university research teams, which will be invited to work in collaboration with researchers from the Accenture Technology Labs on R&D projects that are of strategic importance to the technology industry and Accenture's enterprise clients.

"Universities are a critical source of technical and scientific research that can deliver long-term business benefits for organisations around the world," Accenture Managing Director Global Technology R&D Prith Banerjee said.

Other recipients of the 2015 Accenture Open Innovation university grant include Georgia Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University China, Stanford University, Purdue University, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech, University of California, Berkeley and Haas School of Business.

"The opportunity to collaborate with Accenture researchers will provide us with valuable inputs into how our research can help address the real-world challenges of enterprise organisations," Professor Partha Pratim Talukdar, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore said.

The grant programme is part of Accenture Open Innovation initiative, in which Accenture functions as a bridgemaker between its Global 2000 clients and the technology innovation ecosystem, which includes universities, start-ups, venture capitalists and corporate R&D labs across the world.