HP Labs are dedicated to the task of monitoring and pushing innovation towards its eventual goal of commercial products, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON.

DR PHIL McKINNEY, a friendly, fast-thinking geek who loves ideas and invention, is the innovation gatekeeper at HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard's 600- person research laboratories, spread across six global locations.

Under the re-organisation of the labs, undertaken over the past year by newly-appointed lab director Dr Prith Banerjee, McKinney, officially the chief technology officer for the personal systems group, is the man standing between innovation and commercialisation.

If an idea from the lab looks good, his Innovation Program Office in Palo Alto, California is what starts the process that moves a project towards commercial product. The office's role, he says, is "to create new categories and fundamentally new products for HP".

He terms the group "an important funnel for those innovations that turn into products in HP labs. My team aligns themselves with different programmes within HP labs and starts reaching across. HP Labs' goal is innovation. The business division's focus is products. Translation is how we get innovation into products."

People from diverse backgrounds comprise his team. "We bring people in with a whole wide range of experience." This includes industrial designers, hardware engineers, and an "experience designer". A what? Someone who works solely on the packaging and overall feel of the product, he says. "The thing is to build these cross-disciplinary teams."

All products are now designed for a specific "persona" - a target user who is given a name, a lifestyle, a personality. McKinney describes this as a fundamental shift in how projects become products - they don't come about solely because a room of engineers come up with cool features, he says, but because a room full of engineers considers what feature a certain type of user will find "takes the burden out" of using the product.

"With any product, we ask, 'who's the persona?' And with a feature, we ask, is it a feature that's going to make something easier for that persona?"

Then, he says, they bring the customer in early on in the design so they get real user feedback. Ethnographic considerations are a key part of development. Thus, he argued on his website, philmckinney.com, that he thinks the new career area of study is going to be anthropology, not engineering or computer science. For good measure he adds, "If you are thinking of an MBA: don't! Go for an MFA (master of fine arts)."

In short, it's more important to understand users, aesthetics and markets than to come up with geeky cool features nobody uses.

Interestingly, the target persona for all consumer products is women. Why? "They're the toughest customers," he laughs. "If men have a problem with a product, they tweak it, they go online to find a support system and post questions or look for solutions. With women,three strikes and you are out."

Likewise, most technology companies think primarily of a youthful market, comfortable with new technology. What a mistake, McKinney notes. World population is ageing, and the youth market actually shrinks by 1 per cent a year. Meanwhile, the over-50s are growing at 6 per cent a year, and 50 per cent of disposable income is with the 50-plus age group.

"It's all really about, 'how do I make the technology insanely simple'," he says.

Those are the kinds of thoughts the innovation program team look at, he says, adding: "We're focused not on the current cycle [of products and markets], but the next cycle."

Within the IPO programme, about 28 products are in the pipeline. About 60 per cent come from within HP, either the business unit or HP Labs, with the rest from external partners, through the open innovation programme.

McKinney says the goal is to release two products a year. "That means we need about 200 qualified ideas every year, which means we're evaluating about 1,800 raw ideas."

All projects go through a 'gated funding model'. "When we have a product ready for commercialisation, somewhere in an 18- to 24-month window, what we'll do is staff up an organisation - we set up a 'catching' organisation. There's this transfer process where we actually transfer the knowledge," he says.

"The two teams sit side-by-side. Their job is to do a knowledge transfer between the researchers. Then the product groups begin to pick up the work so the researchers are doing less and less."

Different types of products are on different timelines. "For the printer group, it's much longer than for personal systems. For PCs, the product line is refreshed every 18 to 24 months. But to reinvent print heads - that can take six to eight years."

Thus, a key part of IPO is "being smart about how each business is different. How do we drive and maintain a robust pipeline of innovations?" McKinney says he spends time every other month going through the pipeline projects with HP chief executive Mark Hurd.

He was also at HP long before Banerjee came in and shook things up. Does he approve? "Historically, the transfer from research labs to products has been very low," he says. "We needed to think about how to do a better job . . . there's a fundamental shift in how we do things. We are aligning research programmes with product groups."

Banerjee also has created advisory boards for the project funding process so that serious thinking is done before projects are undertaken. Before, decisions might be taken by single individuals, without consideration of what the market is looking for. "What Prith has brought in is transparency," McKinney says.

Banerjee is himself on all four advisory boards. "This structure, with the transparency and the alignment of research with business processes creates a camaraderie.

"Now, we try to have a range of R&D, and the fundamental technologies to support all of those," says McKinney.

And he is making the tough calls on what goes forward. For the projects that are "further out, you have a wider range of possibilities", such as in the quantum computing and nanotechnology division of the labs.

He aims for a mix of one-third of projects that are near-term, or three to four years away as potential products, one-third medium-term at three to 10 years out, and one-third "fundamental research" at 10 years and beyond, "such as Stan Williams in nanotechnology", he says (see panel)."Part of what's really exciting is this: with HP Labs, we get to look into the future - five to 20 years out."

Then there are processes for bring in partner research. "The question is, how to recognise the brightest partners so we can go co-invent the future," he says.

While his goal is to stay enough on top of technological and global developments and maintain a sound structure for operations so that HP can "avoid surprise", nonetheless "you never know when a wild card is going to come into the process."

He thinks for a moment and clearly starts to relish the challenge certain types of wild cards might introduce. "Actually, it's all part of that - to be a little challenging. We do try to be a little provocative in what we think."