About HP Labs

Nanotechnology laser research

Who we are

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.

Research focus

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 five opportunities that we believe are crucial to defining the future of information technology:

  • Information explosion  – Acquiring, analyzing and delivering the right information to individuals and businesses so they can act on it.
  • Dynamic cloud services – Developing web platforms and cloud services that are dynamically personalized based on your location, preferences, calendar and communities.
  • Content transformation – Enabling the fluid transformation of content from analog to digital, from device to device, and from digital content to physical products.
  • Intelligent infrastructure  – Designing smarter, more secure devices, networks and scalable architectures that work together to connect individuals and businesses to rich, dynamic content and services.
  • Sustainability – Creating technologies, IT infrastructure and new business models for the lower carbon economy that save money and leave a lighter footprint on the environment.

Open innovation

We put a strong emphasis on open innovation, collaborating with universities, venture capitalists, customers and partners 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.

 

Leadership and organization

HP Labs operates under the direction of Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President of Research for HP. We are organized into 23 labs located in seven major sites: in Palo Alto, USA; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Bristol, UK; Haifa, Israel; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Tokyo, Japan. HP Labs also has significant research teams in Princeton, USA and in Barcelona, Spain.

 

History and 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: