HP Innovation Journal Issue 05: Winter 2016 | Page 22

SPECIAL REPORT HP Labs celebrates 50 years of innovation HP marks important milestone with week-long event Fifty years ago HP’s founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard decided to establish a central research lab and in so doing allowed its engineers and researchers to focus on ideas that would help shape the company’s future. Early successes such as the world’s first desk- top scientific calculator set the tone for five decades of innovation at HP Labs. Even as HP honors half a century of innovation, its researchers are focused on the future, advancing our knowledge in such fields as 3D printing, immersive computing, hypermobility, Internet of Things, microfluidics, and more. T he central event of HP’s year-long obser- vation of HP Labs 50th anniversary took place in late September at HP’s Customer Welcome Center in Palo Alto. It brought togeth- er a large contingent of US and international journalists and influencers who were given the opportunity to mingle with HP Labs alumni, HP Fellows, and, most significantly, current HP Labs researchers. Shane Wall, CTO and Global Head of HP Labs, delivers his opening remarks 22 Innovation Journal · Issue 5 · Winter 2016 HP President and CEO Dion Weisler addresses the event participants Framing the research Disruptive technologies Shane Wall, HP’s Chief Technology Officer and Global Head of HP Labs, hosted the gathering. In his opening remarks he explained that the starting point of all research at HP Labs is not technology, but people and the trends that will shape society in the next 30 years. The analysis of these trends and the challenges and prob- lems that society faces now and in the future is what frames the research at HP Labs. In ad- dition, the anchoring vision of all the projects at HP Labs is the idea of “Blended Reality”—how people, places and things interact with our dig- ital reality and how that interaction creates a virtuous re-enforcing cycle, in other words when technology disappears into the background to solve human needs. The assembled journalists and analysts were invited to participate in the following sessions: Reinventing the City: How Rapid Urbanization is shaping future cities and the impact that urbanization will have on societies, economies, and the environment Moderated by Paul Noglows, Executive Director, ForbesLive! And Forbes Media, the pan- el included Chief Engineer and HP Senior Fellow Chandrakant Patel, CEO of Akhan Semiconductor Adam Khan and Sid Espinosa, Director of Civic Engagement and Philanthropy at Microsoft. In the words of Chandrakant Patel, the cen- tral challenge confronting today’s big cities is to define the “…role of the IT eco-system, of the