Go big or go home

When Prithviraj Banerjee arrived at HP Laboratories, in Palo Alto, Calif., as the organization´s new director in August 2007, he was intent on pushing the researchers to swing big. HP Labs, a sprawling enterprise with some 500 researchers spread over seven locations worldwide, is the company´s advanced research arm, spending about US $150 million annually. The first commercially available LED, the pocket scientific calculator, thermal inkjet printing, and reduced instruction-set computer architecture were all born in the labs. The labs got the company into digital printing, and HP is counting on those researchers for future wins.