Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 4)

SM: It is my perspective that the big missed opportunity so far in IT is personalization. Nobody has cracked personalization.

PB: We have a big project in HP Labs on personalization. Today’s personalization is at a Web page level. If you go to Amazon and buy some books, they will recommend other books. If you look at the opportunities that exist in personalization, suppose a technology could mine all the Web pages you have visited, and all the things you do on your computer, the analytics that you could drive on that personalization engine is enormous. We have just demonstrated some very interesting results in that area.

SM: What kind of user model is that assuming? Is it happening on the client side?

PB: The actual business aspects are still being worked on. It is still in the basic science application at the lab.

We have another set of activities going on in our quantum systems lab. They are doing some outstanding work in the area of nanotechnology with some basic chemistry and physics. As part of the basic research, they came across a two-terminal device which has resistive properties as well as memory capabilities. This is a device at the nano scale. In HP Labs we were the first to have the implementation of this device.

That is really basic, fundamental, science. As we started looking at applications, we started hypothesizing what could be done if you could reduce access times. We have the potential to completely disrupt the Flash memory or RAM markets. We could change the entire magnetic disk memory model. Each of those markets are somewhere between $25 billion to $30 billion. It will take 10 years for that to end up in the hands of customers. Today HP is not in the memory business. That is an example of some big-bet, high-impact research that we are doing.

SM: Let’s explore the industry/academia interface. It looks as though there are 12 universities which are set up to effectively conduct technology transfers. They have great engineering schools with good interfaces to the venture capital community. Beyond that, technology transfer is not happening. What is your agenda on that front? America has some of the best universities in the world, and they should be a huge pool of resources for companies like yours.

PB: HP Labs transformation strategy that was launched when I came on board had three pillars. The first pillar was high-impact research. The result was 21 big bets across eight themes. The second pillar was that of technology transfer from HP Labs to the businesses. Even though we are within HP it is a very complex process to take the results of research from HP Labs and turn them into products. That is a very hard problem.

The third pillar is open innovation. Many companies in the past have been close to the outside world but very secretive regarding the work that goes on inside of its labs. That has advantages and disadvantages. While your competition has no idea what you are working on, you ultimately wind up landing in silos.

One thing I put forward at HP Labs was to embrace open innovation. Our model is to work openly with our academic partners to really crack these hard problems. We have identified our eight themes after a lot of thought and analysis. For HP Labs, looking into the future we have identified our 21 big bets based on the most complex problems customers will face in the IT world.

We have actually publicized our eight themes and their projects on our website. Every year we have a call for proposals from academia through our Innovation Research Program. The first year we received 450 proposals, and we funded 45. The second year we received a large number of proposals and we funded 60. We have funded proposals across the world. In America we have the standard schools like such as Stanford, Berkeley, Illinois, and Michigan. We are also funding IIT in India, as well as schools in China and Israel. The smart people are not all in the United States. We are tapping the best minds of people all over the world.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee
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