The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFahterhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

What exactly *does* HP "Invent" nowadays?

While leafing through a catalog from PC Connection, I was struck by the extreme irony of seeing an iPod in the catalog listed as "iPod + HP" with a big "HP Invent" logo adjacent. My immediate reaction was "invent? Invent what?" but the more I think about the current HP strategy, the more I move further towards a personal redefinition of invention and innovation.

First off, fair disclosure, I worked for about four years at Hewlett-Packard's Palo Alto R&D Laboratory as a research scientist back in the late 1980's. With a few other positions at HP (including technical director of the multi-million-dollar HP University Grants Program, a fascinating venue marred by poor management support) (but that's another story!) I was involved with the company for about five years plus another year or two of consulting afterwards.

After I left, I had the opportunity to work closely with Walter Hewlett (the son of Bill Hewlett, the "H" in "HP") at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, and remained in loose contact with Walter during the Fiorina debacle. At the time I was not a supporter of Carly's becoming CEO and after five years of watching her basically fumble HP's lead, pay far too much for the minimally valuable Compaq, lose the strong leadership position in printers, etc., I am still not a fan of her direction.

However. However, when I was at HP we used to spend a lot of time joking about "NIH", the Not Invented Here syndrome that caused us Lab geeks to reinvent darn near everything, from compilers and kernel debuggers to network stacks and protocol suites. It was, in retrospect, a phenomenal waste of time and while the NIHish "next bench" philosophy originally espoused by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard served the company well for many years, it finally ended up a tired, obsolete and irrelevant strategy for a company that had grown far too big to be insular in its product development strategies.

And so in that sense, the real invention of HP's "invent" with the Apple iPod is that HP didn't create their own, but they licensed and repacked the existing market leader to gain a foothold in the exploding market for mp3 and audio players.

It's a dramatic strategic shift and whether it was directly proposed by Fiorina or something that slipped through the cracks of a less centralized management structure (as Carly promised when she took the helm of this blue chip company), it's really a winner and a harbinger of good management direction at HP.

My personal redefinition of innovation is being reshaped by watching the industry in the last few years. One inevitable downside of capitalism is the profligate waste produced by too much competition. How many different companies need to make the exact same personal computer? How many need to buy third-party memory chips and rebrand them as their own?

So innovation isn't what you think it is. It isn't about inventing something new. Sometimes, it just about rethinking what's already around and sometimes it's as simple as putting a number of existing technologies together in unique and interesting ways.

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