Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 5)

SM: How does your approach differ from what other companies have done in the past?

PB: Companies have traditionally funded academic work in the past. In those scenarios the professors would set their own research agendas. Professors would pitch to HP or IBM what they wanted to do. Our variation is that we do not want them pitching their research to us. We want to pitch our needs to them and ask them to propose solutions to us. It is a very direct call-for-proposals approach. It has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that if they really crack the problem, it will be directly relevant to HP Labs and we can transfer it directly to our businesses. The disadvantage is that if there is a professor working in robotics, and robotics is not in our 21 projects, then we will never fund that professor. He may be a Nobel Prize winner, but he will not get funded by us.

SM: That makes a lot of sense. All three pillars of your research maintain a focus.

PB: Everything is about focus. We are truly open to innovation partnerships. We are reaching out, but it is not charity. We have 500 researchers encompassing 20 projects, which equates to about 25 people per project. Each project in general has three university partnerships. We are tapping the mind of the researcher and 10 of his or her graduate students, even if we are only funding two people. That osmosis is just fantastic.

SM: Do your partnerships in academia filter down to second- and third-tier U.S. schools?

PB: They do. We are funding more than 14 U.S. universities. My theory has been that there are smart professors all over. The top 10 engineering schools do not do a lot of hiring. They do not have a lot of faculty positions. The top graduates from these schools have to go to the next-tier schools. There is a lot of talent at those schools.

In the past, when companies went with the grandest schools, they were funding the school because of its brand. What we are saying is that every researcher now has to write a really fantastic research proposal. We have often chosen a proposal from a tier-two school over a tier-one school because the approach was better. It is not about the brand name. It is about the specific work and the specific professor at that school.

SM: You talked about the complexity of technology transfer from HP Labs into the HP business units. Can you elaborate on that?

PB: This is a problem that most corporate research labs have. Corporate research lab researchers want to solve the cool problems. Once they solve them, they can push this technology over the wall. Often, there is hardly any alignment between the research going on in the labs and what the businesses actually need.

First, we let the business units know what we are working on via our advisory board process. No project at HP Labs lasts for more than five years. When the business unit people are voting to fund the project at HP Labs, they have visibility into the project at t–5. A year later, at t–4, the project gets reviewed. Reviews continue for all remaining years. At the point of t–0, they have seen the birth of the child through its growth. They have given us direction throughout. The fact that we have alignment among the businesses is a very important step.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee
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