Revamp of HP Labs Aimed at Innovations with 'Big, Broad Impact'

PALO ALTO, Calif. — It pioneered the programmable calculator, and its ink-jet innovations doomed the dot-matrix printer. Its roots reach back to the very start of Silicon Valley, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented the first affordable oscilloscope.

But when's the last time you heard of something really new and revolutionary from Hewlett-Packard Co.?

For a company that boldly added the word "Invent" to its corporate logo a few years ago, HP hasn't exactly set the world afire with its innovation in recent years.

Company executives realize that. Now, they say, they want to change things.

HP last week (March 6) announced a major overhaul of its HP Labs division that executives say is designed at making bigger impacts for both the company and the entire technology industry.

"This is a big deal for us," said HP CEO Mark Hurd. "We expect HP Labs to be at the forefront" of high-tech research.

For Hurd, who took over HP three years ago this month after a long career with Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., HP Labs is the latest division targeted for a turnaround.

"Really, there are a lot of mini-transformations going on inside HP," Hurd said. "This is just one of those transformations."

Like other recent changes at HP, which has large data centers and other operations in Atlanta, Houston, and Austin, Texas, this one might transform the rest of the technology industry, too.

Some say it could spur a research and development renaissance among other big, old-line tech companies that in recent years lost their innovative edge to start-ups like Google, Facebook and YouTube.

"HP is doing phenomenally well financially, and typically when your company is leading your particular industry, everybody looks to you for leadership," said longtime Silicon Valley observer and tech industry researcher Rob Enderle. "The end result is that people will look at HP and say, 'OK, HP's doing that and it's successful, so we need to do that too.' "

Along with putting pressure on big companies like IBM Corp., as well as printing industry competitors like Epson and Lexmark, HP's new emphasis on HP Labs could force archrival Dell Inc. to do more R&D, Enderle said.

HP isn't adding to — or cutting — its staff of more than 600 researchers as part of the R&D revamp. It's not even putting more money into research or adding to its seven HP Labs locations around the globe.

What it is doing is reducing researchers' workloads from 150 or so ongoing projects and focusing them on just 20 to 30 projects in five areas where it sees potential.

"The resources are the same, we're just reallocating the resources on fewer big bets with hopes that we'll get a better return," said Prith Banerjee, who left his job as dean of the college of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago to take over as director of HP Labs last August.

"HP Labs had a big impact in the past ... but for a long time the company was focused on very specialized products," said Eric Hanson, a 30-year HP veteran who now helps oversee its commercial printing research. "That's not our focus now. Now, we're focused on having a big, broad impact."

The five areas on which the new HP Labs will focus are: Internet-based computing platforms, continued transformation of content from analog to digital formats, intelligent computer infrastructure, sustainable products, and information transfer.

In a rare glimpse into some of its research, HP invited journalists and analysts to its headquarters here last week to see a few projects.

Some are natural fits for the company whose bread and butter comes from selling ink and printers.

A project called CloudPrint, for instance, would let users print e-mail attachments, Web pages or other data from their cell phones.

For commercial printing companies, HP Labs plans to publicly introduce this weekend technology that dramatically speeds up the rate at which paper is fed into commercial printing presses.

Other technology being developed for HP's Snapfish digital photo sharing service lets users quickly retouch photographs online and print them out as posters, or take a picture of a book page or whiteboard and print out a legible copy.

Other research is more far-reaching.

HP Lab researchers in India are working on "gesture-based computing" technology that could take touch screens to a new level.

With the technology, users of touch-screen computers and handheld devices can designate custom symbols for passwords or spell out entire sentences on a little touch pad instead of using a keyboard. Digital camera users can write a caption or a note on a picture they just took using only their finger on the view screen of their camera.

Another HP Labs project, which it calls Face Bubble, uses face-recognition programs to search for and find specific features in digital photographs, such as a cowboy hat or a car.

Yet another project in the works, called Pluribus, uses multiple projectors to deliver cinema-quality video on a wall-sized screen for about a tenth of the price of similar big-screen projection systems today.

Jerry Liu, a HP Labs project manager, said the labs' new structure should help bring fresh perspectives to projects, both from inside and outside the company.

As part of the changes, HP Labs will open some of its R&D work up to feedback from customers and outside researchers through a Web-based application it calls HP IdeaLab.

A new HP department will try to forge new relationships with university and government researchers.

HP also will invite venture capitalists and others into the company as part of an entrepreneur-in-residence program.

"In the past, we might work on a lot of projects, but the critical mass devoted to them could have been better," Liu said." I think this will be better."