HP’s move towards Open Innovtion

HP, we’re told, is reorganising their HP Labs facility to address “the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade“. The reorganisation will take in a more open approach, with the pursuit of 20 to 30 large research projects as a primary focus.

HP Labs has also created an Open Innovation Office “responsible for deepening HP Labs strategic collaborations with this in academia, government and the commercial sector”

Given all this fighting talk we couldn’t resist making a beeline for the area that most excites us, their open innovation platform called HP Idea Lab.

On arrival we couldn’t work out whether we were at an advertising platform, brand site or, as they say, an open innovation platform. It certainly didn’t carry the features or activities of any open innovation platform we’d experienced! (IBM’s Innovation Jam would be worth you checking out at this point if you’re new to open innovation).

The richness of the interface gives it the perception of, say, a gaming or ad platform, whereas the type of platform they aspire to encourages participation and engagement through ease-of-use and established user behaviours. OK, so you can move the big colourful blocks around the screen. So what! What might the reorganisation of these squares tell you about your participants? Absolutely nothing.

Entering into one of the, er, colour blocks , you get a demo of some of the new technologies and initiatives HP are developing. And there the experience effectively ends.

There are opportunities to bookmark the site, comment on a HP blog and send to a friend, but these alone do not justify the label ‘open innovation’. Sadly, HP have tried to reinvent the wheel rather than hook onto existing social media tools and user behaviours to get the audience to share their thoughts, refine ideas and become advocates. Henry Chesbrough states that open innovation is ‘the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation”, yet HP appear to have done everything possible to stifle interactivity and sharing by presenting a poor user-interface. Our advice to HP is drop the whizzes and the bangs and focus on how best to get your very specific and passionate audience thinking about and interacting with your work and theology, and not just the visual design of the interface. Think about  giving something back to those who actively participate - a demo just isn’t enough.