Innovation is a key lever to deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and to create an adaptive strategy that helps to break down resistance and take advantage of any opportunities that arise.

At NTT DATA, we nurture the process of transforming ideas into something tangible and beneficial for our clients and society as whole, creating a vision for a sustainable future through technology.

We work hard to foster a culture of innovation, both within our own organization and those of our clients. Innovation takes many forms and we help innovate traditional industries and business models, while also accompany businesses in more ambitious and disruptive initiatives to leverage innovation to reach new markets and clients.

Innovating together

Making sure that our approach to innovation remains robust, that our ideas stay relevant, and that our knowledge stays ahead of our clients’ needs, means keeping a strategic focus on certain areas.

From knowing what is going on in the market now and looking ahead to tomorrow, to embedding an innovation mindset in our employees and co-creating with our clients, NTT DATA invests heavily in finding solutions to technological, commercial and societal challenges.

As the business environment shifts and morphs at pace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict changes and make the right decisions. Here, we leverage cutting-edge technologies and a highly skilled and experienced team to discover emerging trends and market insights, envision the future and turn decision making into a competitive advantage.

And NTT DATA’s people are innovators at heart. Aligning our company’s culture and the mindset of employees with our innovation strategy is a key pillar of how we work. We founded an innovation school in Spain to train employees in the finer points of innovative thinking. The school, known internally as innCub3, provides a crash course in innovation. It conducts consulting, training and awareness programs to assess and increase innovation mindsets and learn innovation techniques. This also enables group learning via open laboratories and co-creation workshops on how to think in a customer-centric manner.

innCub3 is there to inspire, train, support and empower employees through ‘learning by doing’, and it has been recognized as differential by independent analysts.

Most importantly, NTT DATA works to a true open innovation model, enabling clients to gain access to world-class innovation ecosystems. We foster collaboration with universities and research centers, start-ups and NTT global and local R&D Labs to help imagine and realize the next breakthrough.

Our labs network

One such research center is the Living Lab in Barcelona, Spain. The Living Lab, designed and driven by an open innovation culture, is a purpose-built space for promoting and developing innovation through the use of new technologies, methodologies and tools that add value to the entire innovation cycle, and acts as an Innovation Hub.

The center in Barcelona is also home to the company’s first global team specializing in artificial intelligence research and development, the NTT DATA AI Center of Excellence, as well as teams dedicated to digital government, IoT, blockchain, AR/VR and other areas of emerging technologies.

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In August 2022, NTT DATA established six new Innovation Centers around the world, situated in countries where customers have high sensitivity to the latest trend. The investment increases opportunities to work with academia and tap into the innovation ecosystems in these regions. 

These local centers – in Japan, the United States, Italy, Germany, China and India – will focus on leading-edge technologies with the potential to become mainstream within five to ten years, aiming to generate new business through joint R&D with customers. Around 100 experts, mainly researchers, consultants and engineers, currently staff the centers but by the end of 2025, this will increase to 300. Through this expansion, the aim is to establish world-leading capabilities for the utilization of advanced technology.

In Europe, the lab in Milan, Italy is collaborating with the lab in Munich, Germany to pursue initiatives in cutting-edge areas such as quantum computing and the industrial metaverse. Each lab has a focus for its research:

  • Japan: NTT research lab technologies – genomes, metaverse, quantum computing
  • United States: customer contract-related technologies – digital humans, smart city planning
  • Italy & Germany: data processing and simulation technologies – quantum computing, industrial metaverse
  • China: hardware-related technologies – remote sensing technology (LiDAR), metaverse
  • India: prototype development.

 

In the UK, the Foresight Studios lab at Epworth House in London focuses on emerging technologies. Launched in 2019, the UK lab has partnered with The R&A on a digital twin computing project, as well as with children’s hospital Great Ormond’s Street – the largest center for research and postgraduate teaching in children’s health in Europe – on Digital Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments (DRIVE).

The London research team has also collaborated with start-ups and scale-ups in emerging technologies, from virtual and augmented reality to applications of machine learning.

“This investment increases our opportunities to work with academia and tap into the innovation ecosystem in this region. We create value for our clients by using or creating the latest technology, and that starts in the lab.”

Head of Foresight Studios lab at Epworth House and CTO of NTT DATA UK, Tom Winstanley, looks forward to what this expansion of R&D means for the company and for clients: “Good research deserves to be rewarded, and I’m delighted that NTT DATA is committing to the material applications of these exciting new technologies. Early successes in quantum computing and AI show the depth of our experts’ knowledge and hands-on capabilities. I look forward to the new wave of globally informed digital solutions and innovation that our lab network can produce going forward.”

 

Get in touch today to book into one of our labs.

 

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Read more about innovation at NTT DATA

Watch the Living Lab Guided Tour

Read about NTT DATA’s partnership with Microsoft to offer hybrid cloud solutions

Learn more about London’s Epworth House