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“HP has created the Innovation Program Office (IPO) for bringing new ideas to market. The IPO is designed and run by Phil McKinney, the CTO of our Personal Systems Group and the creator of the Killer Innovations podcast.

Research, Technology, & Teamwork blog by Susie Wee, Director of the HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab.

“The innovation office’s role is to accelerate the development of ideas into commercial products, and once under the group’s aegis, it doesn’t take long for a particular idea to either get annexed into H-P’s product line or to fizzle out”.

Inside H-P’s Idea Incubator by Alexei Oreskovic, The Street.

“The industry is littered with technology solutions that didn’t win. To me, innovation is all about paying attention to the big picture and executing on the details”.

Mark Potter, President and General Manager for HP’s BladeSystem as quoted by Rick Whiting. Read 2007 Tech Innovators: Unlocking The Secrets Of Innovation on CMP’s VAR Business.

This week I have come across two articles featuring HP’s innovation: “Putting the i into HP” by Reena Jana and “Unlocking the secrets of innovation” by Rich Whiting. Synthesizing the two, in the past two years HP has learned about:

• Acquiring talent and markets from outside (e.g. Voodoo, Snapfish, Tabblo)
• Closing the gap between ‘overabundance of ideas from the labs’ and product development (e.g. The Innovation Program Office).
• Delivering high margin products in new market categories (e.g. high performance gaming)
• Leveraging web based consumer research (e.g. Snapfish Labs)
• Innovating on the quality of user experiences (e.g. HP’s slogan: ‘the computer is personal again’)
• Inspiring HP Lab’s staff to invest time in concept work and rapid prototyping (e.g. Panoply project)
• Getting HP’s staff to live and experience the products (e.g. pilgrimages to the gaming room)
• Sending engineers to the field, getting partners’ and customers’ feedbacks on prototypes
• Shortening the time it takes from conceptualizing to launching actual products (e.g. 12-18 months)

The following characterizes IPO, the Innovation Program Office, which is handing 20+ projects:

• Devising ways to extend the reach of HP’s business into new markets.
• Developing a group with a distinct personality, different from HP Labs central research (mostly scientific research).
• Operating separately from general R&D projects undertaken by HP business units (mostly focused on core products).
• Accepting ideas from anyone.
• Tapping into creative and passionate HP employees.
• Prioritizing projects driven by clear goals and milestones to deliver a “2 big enough wins a year“.
• Identifying business sponsors and a champion to drive them though.
• Providing sufficient resources for projects to succeed and to move quickly.
• Speedy checkpoints involving continue/kill decisions, weeding out the unviable.
• Quickly reallocating opportunity dollars to another innovation project when killing a program.
• Becoming a growth engine on the top line and the margin.

The first HP IPO project is expected to be launched in 2008. These seem to be two current candidates:

• Project Panoply will deliver multipanel PC display featuring a seamless image on a wall size screen, which reminds me a previous post on Accenture’s high def interactive screen.
• eBook reader project allowing people to read digital versions of books without the eye strain typically suffered when using today’s electronic displays. This also reminds me a more recent post on Amazon’s Kindle.

If you are interested in this subject, I would suggest reading the following posts talking about innovation offices and practices in other companies:

• Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group
• Yahoo’s Brickhouse
• Adobe’s Business Initiatives Group
• Symbol’s Emerging Business Office
• Nokia’s Emerging Business Unit
• Corel’s Virtual Garage
• Microsoft’s Incubation
• IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunities
• IBM’s Venture Capital Group
• IBM’s 5 Innovations For The Next 5 Years
• Frogdesign’s Strategy+Design
• Apple’s Design Power
• Proter & Gamble’s Design+Connect
• British Telecom Innovation Scouts
• Google’s Innovation Guidelines
• Nokia’s Design Research For Everyone
• 3M’s Lead User Innovation
• 3M’s Innovation Recipe
• Sony’s Innovation Recipe
• Xerox’s Customer Lead Innovation
• NEC’s Innovation Initiatives
• Apple’s Design Lessons
• Philips‘ Foresight By Design
• Slim Devices’s Customer Co-Design
• Audi’s Design Foundation
• Intel’s Innovation Challenge
• BT & Microsoft’s Imagine Cap
• McKinsey’s Innovation@Scale
• The Top 10 Best R&D Companies

To finish this post, I would just like to share some additional insights I gathered from Reena’s article:

• Xerox and IBM create “skunkworks” teams focusing on cutting-edge technologies, independently of corporate processes, policies and organizational structures.
• Intel’s “venture capital unit”, funding both internal and external projects as an incubator, also independently from the company’s overall corporate structure.
• HP, Nokia, Yahoo and traditionally Cisco are innovating via “absortion”, meaning the acquisition of other companies.

J. de Francisco Chicago, IL. 23 November 07

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“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this article: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car. [2] Yahoo’s Innovation Recipe: Iterate, See Customer Reactions, Launch Fast. [3] Mobile Phone Concepts: Egy Studio. [4] The Top 10 Best R&D Companies In The World. [5] Project Ergofuturo: ErgoTrans (1991 Product Concept). [6] Free Web 2.0 Meeting Tools: Vyew, Yugma, Dimdim, Zoho. [7] Transforming Your Old Laptop Into An “Internet Communicator”. [8] $200 Mobile Computing + 2.0 Apps: Getting Ready For Prime Time. [9] Transforming Your Old Laptop Into An “Internet Communicator” (2). [10] USA: “Amazon’s Kindle & Sprint”; EU: “Polymer Vision & TIM”