Innovation labs are a trendy way for both startups and legacy companies to display a finger on the pulse of new tech. Accenture PLC has been in the game for 30 years with its Accenture Labs network, yielded much more than geek cred, according to Paul Daugherty (pictured), chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture.

“We now have an innovation fabric that goes from research to our ventures into our labs and the rest of Accenture’s business,” Daugherty said.

This fabric is a kind of funnel, he told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Accenture Labs 30th Anniversary Celebration in Mountain View, California. At one end, the innovation labs suck in technological innovation in its infant stage of development. Accenture has labs for this purpose spread across the globe from Dublin to Tel Aviv to Beijing.

Once potential is discovered, Accenture invests proper funds, research and development. The results finally flow out into concrete business value, Daugherty explained.

The Accenture Cloud Platform is just such a “research to results” story. “We were doing R&D and patents and research in the cloud before the term ‘cloud’ existed,” he said. The assets and architectures it had toiled on eventually formed the platform’s foundations.

Accenture Labs are currently researching artificial intelligence and other new tech for the next boon to its business, according to Daugherty. “We can take innovations like quantum computing and ramp it right into our business,” he said.

The company has ambitious goals outside of the labs as well. It has stated a goal of 50/50 gender representation within Accenture by 2025. Daugherty, a Girls Who Code board member, said the company is now about 36 percent female.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Accenture Labs 30th Anniversary Celebration.

Photo: SiliconANGLE