KPMG, EY, PwC, Deloitte, Accenture’s new weapons: toys, tech and Play-Doh 

“The room is a tool,” said Kristina Craig, a director at the firm and head of the lab. “It’s to support thinking creatively.

“If people come in and feel off-balance, that’s a good thing. Just the fact we do have things people can touch and play with courts a more open conversation.”

The lab has been soft-launched with select clients and will be officially opening next week.

‘Creation space’ boom

The multimillion-dollar room is part of a mini-boom in “creation spaces” across corporate Australia – large corporations such as the big banks have their own labs – where senior executives and staff can be terrified and/or dazzled with interactive presentations about the forces that will disrupt their business before trying to figure out how to disrupt themselves.

While the firms are quick to point to their special brand of research and idea creation, and they all feature expensive hardware in their labs, at least one consultant thinks brainstorming would be as effective in a noisy pub.

“The best part about [the labs] in my view is that they take corporate innovation away from business cases, spreadsheets and slide decks and make it about experiments and prototypes with a focus on iterating and accelerating learning,” said Peter Williams, an ex-partner at Deloitte and head of the firm’s Centre for the Edge, which involves, in part, researching how technology is changing society.

KPMG’s offering features Ms Craig and her team of two consultants analysing all the latest technology and services from around the world and their potential impact upon a client’s industry.

The focus is on separating the social media hype around new technology and where the money is actually going, in terms of venture capital funding and patents.

“We’re helping clients to understand the difference between walk and talk,” she said.

Ms Craig, 28, has extensive experience in start-up land and was a co-founder of e-commerce consultancy MindArc before joining KPMG.

Very reluctantly, she admitted to “skipping a few years” of high school because she kept “100 percenting most things” before beginning an Information Technology and Economics degree at Macquarie University at age 16.

Ms Craig has also worked as a beta-tester at Blizzard games studio and spent time as a consultant at EY.

She remains an avid gamer, nominating Age of Empires II as a favourite title, and puts together personal computers in her spare time.

Greenhouses and more toys

EY has recently established a Design Studio in its Melbourne office to help clients with strategic problems using the firm’s “Innovation Realised” methodology, said Gerard Dalbosco, the firm’s Melbourne managing partner.

“That is designed to have the clients walk away with some tangible actions,” he said.

“There’s a bit of iteration in these sessions. The fail fast is important. The methodology forces that. If you get to a point where you hit a brick wall you can revert, go back and think again.”

Mr Dalbosco described the studio an open flexible space with virtual-reality gear, drones, a 3D printer and even an old-fashioned whiteboard.

PricewaterhouseCoopers uses a combination of Innovation Hubs and Experience Centres in its east-coast offices.

“They are co-working and incubation spaces that we share with a number of start-ups and use as co-working spaces with clients,” said John Riccio, a partner and digital services leader at the firm.

And the toys. Mr Riccio outlined a range of gadgets including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Samsung GearVR and Google Cardboard VR Headsets, motion input devices such as the Leap Motion and other systems to visualise customer feedback and other data.

Deloitte has five “Greenhouse” innovation labs across the country which feature interactive touchscreens and other tech gear like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive sets for clients to play with, said Jason Bender, a partner at the firm and a national leader in its innovation program.

Mr Bender said the focus of the Deloitte labs, which are also set up at client sites as required, is to “speed up strategic thinking to create products and services”.

A pub is just as good

Professional services giant Accenture runs workshops in both purpose-built facilities full of gadgets such as multi-touch tables and rapid prototyping hardware and software, but also plain rooms with little more than whiteboards, sticky notes and paper workshop templates.

“We do use some digital tools, like Marvel or InVision, to quickly make clickable prototypes out of sketches, but we might just as often sketch a storyboard or make a diorama out of cardboard,” said Andy Polaine, senior design and innovation principle at Accenture.

Colleague Justin Baird takes the view that “noisy coffee shops or pubs” are just as good for thinking up new ideas.

“I’ve had tremendously productive sessions in purpose built facilities, as well as noisy coffee shops or pubs,” Mr Baird, the firm’s managing director for technology, research and development and innovation, said.

He added: “So much of it has to do with the company you’re keeping and the subject areas. Sometimes lack of distraction can come in the form of an overly noisy environment where everything else is washed out as noise.”