About HP Labs

HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard, tackling complex challenges facing our customers and society over the next decade, while pushing the frontiers of fundamental science.
HP Labs: Creating the future

Our research spans a wide range of technical disciplines and touches all of HP's businesses. Collectively, we are applying our expertise in these areas to address eight opportunities that we believe are crucial to defining the future of information technology:

  • Analytics – Creating technologies and processes that deliver new ways to leverage data across different formats and business disciplines, enabling faster, better informed decision-making.
  • Cloud – Delivering an application and computing end-state of Everything-as-a-Service.
  • Content transformation – Enabling the seamless transfer of content between physical and digital media, and providing access to content wherever customers desire.
  • Digital commercial print – Transforming inflexible, manual mass production printing processes to flexible, customized, on-demand printing processes which are enabled by new digital technologies that allow for lower cost, higher quality commercial printing.
  • Immersive interaction – Designing a radically simplified user experience, where human interaction through and with technology becomes completely seamless and intuitive.
  • Information management  – Turning enormous and rapidly increasing amounts of enterprise information into relevant business insight.
  • Intelligent infrastructure  – Designing smarter, more secure enterprise computing devices, networks and storage using scalable architectures that work together to connect individuals and businesses to an exponentially expanding array of dynamic content and services.
  • Sustainability – Creating technologies, IT infrastructure and new business models that promote low emissions, save money and leave a lighter footprint on the environment.

Open innovation

We put a strong emphasis on open innovation, collaborating with universities, customers and partners, and governments to gain insights and to amplify the work of our 600 researchers. Through our Open Innovation Office we are deepening these relationships and ensuring that joint research endeavors result in high-impact research that meets the scientific and business objectives of HP and its partners.

 

Technology transfer

HP's Technology Transfer Office is charged with accelerating the commercialization of HP Labs technologies, through transfer to existing businesses, new business incubations, and intellectual property licensing agreements with third parties and via the venture capital community.

HP established an IP Licensing office in 2003 to ensure that HP commercializes its intellectual property that it has decided not to develop on its own. This office provides outside companies both large and small with access to the fruits of HP’s R&D resources via licensing agreements.

 

Leadership and organization

HP Labs operates under the direction of Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President of Research for HP. We are organized into 19 labs located in six major sites: in Palo Alto, USA; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Bristol, UK; Haifa, Israel; and St. Petersburg, Russia. HP Labs also has significant research teams in Princeton, USA and in Barcelona, Spain.

 

Technology contributions

In 1966, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard decided to create a central research lab for HP to free scientists from day-to-day business problems so they could focus on ideas that would help shape the company's future.

HP Labs has a long history of technical achievements including such well-known early innovations as pocket scientific calculator (1972), thermal inkjet printing (1984) and RISC architecture (1986).

In the past two decades, our contributions have ranged from optical sensing technology used in cordless mice (1998), to the world's first molecular logic gate (1999), a fundamental step in the creation of chemically assembled electronic nanocomputers, to Jena, the most popular toolkit for Semantic Web developers (2000).

HP Labs began its pioneering work in what is now known as sustainable IT in 2000, resulting in hundreds of patents and several HP products, including Dynamic Smart Cooling (2006) which reduces data center cooling costs by 25 to 40 percent.

» HP Labs timeline (1966-2006)
» 40 years of contribution (history)
» Former directors

 

Other recent innovations include: