Accenture has launched a new immersive engagement and investment program targeting emerging technology software startups to help fill strategic innovation gaps for the Global 2000. Called Project Spotlight, the exclusive Accenture Ventures program represents a new approach to engaging with the global software startup community. Beyond making capital investments, Project Spotlight will offer unprecedented access to Accenture's technology domain expertise and its enterprise clients. Startups will co-innovate with Accenture at its Innovation Hubs, Labs and Liquid Studios, working with subject matter experts to adapt their solutions to the enterprise market and scale faster and more effectively. Created by six-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO, Tom Lounibos, Project Spotlight seeks to transform the transactional nature of venture capital into an immersive engagement model. "For many startups, the most challenging part of bringing a solution to market isn't having a powerful idea or securing funding," said Lounibos, who is the managing director, Accenture Ventures and Project Spotlight lead.

Epiphanies at innovation conventions are hardly new, but Tim Heinze wasn't expecting his when the light bulb went off. The director of strategic operations for insurance company AXA XL's North American property unit, Heinze had just watched a presentation in which an IBM engineer talked about how Watson, the company's artificial intelligence (AI) software, generates efficiencies in offshore oil drilling operations. The presenter claimed that the Watson technology could "help one engineer think like a thousand." "That caught my attention," Heinze recalls, nodding to the red-hot trend of using sophisticated software to augment work performed by humans. AXA XL is piloting AI and natural language processing (NLP) software to help populate and process information on commercial business properties.