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.