Bangalore, the place to be for any technology company, kept us very busy the last few days. We had the chance to visit Accenture’s Innovation Hub, Cisco’s business park comprising of 9 large buildings, LinkedIn to learn about AI to make content more meaningful, and last but not least swissnex India getting insights from Indian start-ups. Apart from all the company visits, we also had the chance to get a glimpse of a normal school day for children in India at the Good Shepherd School.
«Providing an opportunity in life» – this is what the Good Shepherd School is aiming for. The Good Shepherd School enables 26’000 children of disadvantaged and oppressed rural communities access to English-mediumeducation. Children from 4 to 15 years of age shall be given the chance to transform holistically, as well as be empowered to become independent. The Good Shepherd School’s efforts align well with one of our themes «enableAccessibility.» Having the chance to visit this school was a very special experience for us. It was heart opening to interact with open-minded and curious children.
The Good Shepherd School partners with «Dignity Freedom Network » who represents the cause in Switzerland (dfnschweiz). Alongside the school, dfn also provides other services to disadvantaged rural communities in India. Some of which are health initiatives, economic development and anti-trafficking. All these engagements combined empower children to transform holistically.
Thank you very much to Nobi and Rajesh for the warm welcome at your school and encouraging us to interact with the children.
We had the honour to visit our platinum partner’s Accenture Innovation Hub in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India! Akshay Shankar Sapaliga and Satish Viswanathan held collaborative sessions on how Accenture co-creates innovations with clients. Unique about this hub is that the entire innovation architecture is situated in one location. Every day, over 100 clients visit the hub to design and co-create innovations with Accenture’s teams. Accenture focuses on three core areas – digital customer, reinvention of industry and intelligent enterprise.
Experience Design & Delivery
Experience design and delivery supports clients to create experiences that enhance client’s touchpoints with their customers. For instance, Accenture developed a mobile app for a construction company. This digital mobile solution supports construction managers to check availability of specialists, book them, and check the progress of the different construction specialists.
Use cases
Special transit automation provides truck drivers with personalised cards to more easily and faster transit through cities. Smart building enables owners to manage building maintenance more efficiently and sustainably. For the innovation precision farming they had a miniature farm, showing how soil dryness can be assessed with sensors to plan water usage more responsibly, as well as to fight pesticides more precisely to only spray where needed.
Did you know that Cisco, one of the biggest hard and software company, was founded from a love story? In the 1980s, Stanford university students fell in love and wanted to communicate with each other. They founded a network system that changed the world. Cisco has 73’000 employees worldwide. Most of which are based in the American region with 57%, 28% in Asia and 17% in Europe. In India, Cisco has been operating for 23 years and has about 10’000 employees, situated in big business parks all around Bangalore.
Cisco sees great potential in the Indian market
We learnt from Ram Viswanathan that Cisco sees a huge market potential in India. India is believed to be a 1 trillion-dollar economy because of its biggest market of mobile traffic globally, as well as the government’s efforts to make India a digital economy. For many Indians, owning a mobile phone has become more important than owning a proper shelter. Given this immense business opportunity and Cisco’s strong market position, Cisco aims to enable digital transformation across India with many different business models and initiatives.
Accessibility initiative for disabled people
Karthik, an employee with seeing disability, explained to us Cisco’s efforts of enabling individuals with disability access to technology that would otherwise be impossible. Karthik is an accessibility tester for such solutions. Ensuring the accessibility to such products is another great use case of our theme «enableAccessibility». One example is a screen reader that reads and describes written as well as visual content.
«Build a driving community of professionals to connect and explore economic opportunities» – this is what LinkedIn is driving for. Thanks to Sébastien Hug, CEO and Consul General of swissnex India, we had the pleasure to visit LinkedIn’s second largest global office in Bangalore. LinkedIn Bangalore is specialised in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. AI and Machine Learning are leveraged to make content more meaningful and relevant for LinkedIn users.
Utilising artificial intelligence
As professionals and students, you may know of some of their products – people you may know, feed, jobs, learning or recruiter search. For all these products AI is utilised. With algorithms, LinkedIn can remove bad content and leverage good content, while enabling machines to continuously improve content for its users. For instance, user flagging such as «hide this post” or “report this post» trains the machine of what individual users find relevant or irrelevant. One of the challenges LinkedIn and other social media platforms face is fact checking. Fake news can still not be identified on a fully-automated basis. Nonetheless, collaboration with other social media providers take place to develop better solutions. Also, LinkedIn has put some efforts into enabling accessibility to blue- collared workers in the US and India. Not only white-collar professionals should be able to get access to such professional networking platforms to be exposed to job opportunities, but also blue collared professionals.
With much appreciation, we’d like to express a sincere thank you for having the opportunity to visit the world’s largest professional network. A special thanks to Sébastien Hug for organising this visit, as well as to Vivek Tyagi and his team for providing us with insights into the LinkedIn world.
Swissnex
As a last visit in Bangalore, swissnex India welcomed us at their office. Swissnex India connects Swiss and Indian universities, faculty, researcher and student levels to enable the exchange of ideas, and catalysing collaborations. Their main goal is to connect the dots in education, research, and innovation. Swissnex India further offers coaching for Swiss companies interested in expanding to the Indian market. Sébastien Hug and Margot Aeberhard organised two Indian start-up pitches, which we perceived highly interesting.
Here’s further information on the pitches:
- Dr. s.c.g. Kiruba Daniel from JK Nanosolutions presented a great solution for enabling access to clean water.
This video explains the process of purifying water - Akshay V. Singhal from Log9 Materials showcased how they’ve developed water aluminium solution «metal-air battery» to recharge batteries of automobiles
To learn how this works, watch this video