500 HP LAB-RESEARCHERS SHIFT FOCUS TO BOTTOM LINE

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/31/BUCF19ES5E.DTL
500 HP LAB-RESEARCHERS SHIFT FOCUS TO BOTTOM LINE
In
the past, the 500 researchers at the famed HP Labs – creator of the
first scientific pocket calculator, among other things – were spread
over 150 projects at any given time, with little expectation of
immediate hits.But since a new regime took over the distinguished
research facility two years ago, HP Labs has reorganized into 21 labs
pursuing eight big themes, from cloud services to sustainability and
immersive interaction.The result: Researchers have been called to
collaborate more with each other, their business unit counterparts and
outside scientists, and find a way to speed the transfer of their
research into new products and services.An example of this new approach
is the CeNSE project, a sprawling vision for a worldwide system of
sensors that can monitor a multitude of conditions such as traffic, air
quality, light, temperature and vibrations.The project will take a few
more years to come to fruition. But for now, it represents the changes
that have taken place under HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee.Banerjee
arrived at Hewlett-Packard to take the helm of HP Labs and turn it into
a modern research facility that can continue to fuel focused innovation
and drive bigger business for its $118 billion company.The result was a
major reorganization in March last year that marked a departure from
some of the original goals instilled by company founders Bill Hewlett
and Dave Packard, who envisioned a broadly focused research arm
unencumbered by daily business concerns.In the case of CeNSE,
researchers from various business units and HP Labs teams have
converged to build a comprehensive system that incorporates millions of
sensors with robust computing and analytical power.

The project
taps a wide array of researchers, who work on everything from hardware
and software to services and networking. Even the people responsible
for ink-jet printer cartridges have been called in to help conceive of
enclosures for the tiny thumbnail-sized sensors.
New modelIt’s the
kind of synergistic effort that HP Labs wasn’t always known for but is
becoming common under Banerjee.”The reorganization focused our thinking
on how we can come up with a bigger impact on the company,” said Peter
Hartwell, a master scientist working on the CeNSE project. “Sensors by
themselves are a small bet. But put it all together and this is a big
bet.”

The moves were necessary to ensure that HP continues to
grow and find new business opportunities that can affect the bottom
line, said Banerjee. With the pace of technology increasing, the
company can’t afford to wait for what he called “random acts of
discovery.”His challenge to the troops: Advance the state of the art
while building the next billion-dollar opportunity for HP.”It’s been a
tremendous effort, but the results are showing,” Banerjee said. “Given
the conditions we’re working under, I think this is absolutely the
right approach we’re taking.”Working togetherAcross the organization,
conversations between disciplines have blossomed as researchers have
looked for ways in which they can help each other address HP Labs’
shorter list of priorities.

Data center designers have talked
with researchers in photonics in an effort to design more efficient and
powerful computing facilities that transmit information via light.”The
big change has been instead of talking in an isolated context, now
we’re taking different things and seeing what can happen when we put
them together,” said Parthasarathy Ranganathan, a distinguished
technologist and data center designer.In other cases, the orders from
the top have forced researchers to work together. For instance, the
labs corralled a bunch of cloud computing projects into a more focused
effort aimed at helping corporate customers make the leap into the
cloud.

The transition comes with trade-offs, said Carl Taussig,
director of the information surfaces lab, who is working on flexible
display technology. There’s less emphasis on the long-term projects and
more of a push to get technology into products quicker, he said.But as
HP has grown into a company 10 times the size it was when Hewlett and
Packard left, there’s more of a need to find projects that leave a
bigger impact, he said.
Discretionary projects

Banerjee said
that despite the shift in focus, the labs are still in the business of
finding happy accidents. He said 20 percent of the researchers in
various labs are allowed to work on discretionary projects while all
researchers can use 20 percent of their time on creative
activities.Banerjee said it will be this speculative work that will
help determine what next year’s big bets are when the company does its
annual review of projects. And that, he believes, will keep the wheels
of innovation turning at HP.”I’m incredibly excited about the future of
HP Labs,” he said. “We’ve completed our transformation and our
researchers are all on board.”
HP Labs innovations

1966
HP Labs develops the first commercially available light-emitting diode (LED).

1972
The HP-35 becomes the first scientific pocket calculator.

1984
HP launches its first ink-jet printer, which is based on thermal ink-jet technology developed at the labs in the 1970s.

1994
Building
on work that began in the labs in 1981, researchers team with Intel to
develop what eventually becomes Intel’s next-generation Itanium
architecture, introduced in 2001. It advances computing from 32 to 64
bits.

2002
Researchers create the technology for the first rewritable DVD system (DVD+RW) compatible with standard DVD players.

2008
Researchers
solve a decades-old mystery by proving the existence of a fourth basic
element (named the memristor) in integrated circuits that could make it
possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with
memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there
is no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on.

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September 9, 2009 at 11:04 AM