Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 3)

SM: Can you give me a sense of the process you use to choose the areas of your research?

PB: I can tell you a bit about the new way that we are running HP Labs. My vision and decision was to focus on 20 to 30 big-bet projects that would really make a difference to HP. The common thread is that the research must satisfy twin goals. The first goal is that we must truly advance the state of the art in whatever we do. I am not talking about incremental changes.

Some researchers will read a publication and realize that they could make 10% improvements on their published research. I am not interested in incremental changes. I have told researchers that as they put together their big-bet, large research collaborations, each of them involving 20 to 30 researchers, they have to crisply identify the problem they are solving. They must also advance the state of the art by at least an order of magnitude in whatever they do.

The second aspect is that it must present a significant commercial impact for HP. Since HP is a $100-billion company then the impact must be at least $1 billion. That is not a guarantee, but I am asking each of the projects to shoot for the moon. They must significantly advance the state of the art and have a $1 billion impact on HP.

The process we have set up is that researchers in HP Labs can pitch for a project in front of a board. There is an advisory board at HP Labs, one-third of whom are lab administrators, one-third of whom are businesspeople from across the company, and one-third of whom are technologists from across the company. Even if all the business unit people want to fund a short-term project, they have to work together to get enough votes from the technologists to make it. The technologies cannot do a project just for the science value; they must get buy-in from the other groups.

Just by the structure of our advisory board we can ensure that any projects which get funded really have the impact needed. The board is given the charter that one-third of the research projects selected should be basic research, one-third must be applied, and one-third must be product. That was my goal structure.

When I arrived at HP Labs, only 6% of our research was basic research. I told Shane that we needed to get a lot more basic research. Two years later we have 21 big-bets around 8 themes. The distribution is now 30% basic research, 40% applied research, and 30% product. That is where I wanted to be. The reason we got there is because researchers are proposing ideas and a board is making the selections.

The board is like the managing partners in a VC fund. A fund is given an objective. It may be that 30% of its portfolio must be IT companies and 28% must be biotechnology companies. Collectively, the partners have to hit those goals. That is exactly what we have done.

SM: What are the themes of your basic research?

PB: When you talk about HP you are talking about three very large divisions. There is an imaging and printing division that sells printers and copiers. There is a personal systems group that sells PCs, laptops, and so forth. The third group is enterprise systems, which has an enterprise server storage division, a software division, and a services division.

There is no correlation between the themes and the products. That is by design. The themes of research are digital commercial print, content transformation, immersive interaction, cloud, analytics, intelligent infrastructure, information exposure, and sustainability. Let’s look at a theme like content transformation. This theme is saying there is a seamless transformation between the digital and physical worlds. It is about transferring a digital image to paper and then perhaps back to digital. You cannot say that is the printer division, or the laptop division.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee
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