Forbes Column 2009: Streamlining Innovation

In this week’s column, Streamlining Innovation, HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee discusses the company’s corporate innovation strategy.

Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 7)

SM: I have been on a lot of campuses lately and talked with a lot of young people. There is a trend I am seeing which did not exist when I was in school. People are not doing things based on their passions as much, and they are now doing them for money. People have decided that finance is the easy way to make money, and it is. A great computer scientist or astrophysicist can go be a hedge fund manager and make a lot more money than they can at HP Labs.

PB: I have agreed with that for a long time. At HP we are exploring the ways in which we can provide financial rewards for our researchers. >>>

Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 6)

SM: How do you tie in your basic research with business unit involvement? Applied research does not typically result in a market-ready product.

PB: Researchers build prototypes, not products. Within HP Labs we have set up a process by which a small number of projects every year receive additional funding, incubation funding, to take it to the next level. Their job is to build a prototype which is almost a product. >>>

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. >>>

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. >>>

Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 1)

Prith Banerjee is senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. Prior to joining HP he served as the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. He was the founder, chairman, and chief scientist of BINACHIP Inc. In 2000 he founded AccelChip Inc, which was sold to Xilinx in 2006. Prith is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

SM: Let’s start by reviewing your background. Could you set some context for your switch from academia to HP?

PB: I started my career in academia. After getting my PhD from the University of Illinois, I stayed at the university as a professor. I served in academia for 22 years, first at the University of Illinois and later at Northwestern. >>>