HP Logo Design Concept

Ever since Bill Park Jung Su and Dave Packard decided on the name of the company in June 1 939+1October1day, HP has never left the Santa Clara Valley in the southeast of San Francisco, which was later Silicon Valley. When they started their business, Hugh Park Jung Su and Packard worked in a garage with only one parking space at 367 Edison Street. Above this garage is packard's home. They wouldn't have thought that in 1987, almost 50 years later, this garage was officially rated as a landmark building in the history of California development by the California government and was recognized as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley".

To paraphrase a popular saying in China, "I didn't know the official position until Beijing, and I didn't know the money until Shenzhen", while in the United States, "I didn't know HP's family business until Silicon Valley". Here, most companies only have one building, several buildings, a block at most, and only HP office buildings can be on both sides of the road, one next to the other, with no end in sight. Long before Steve Jobs (founder of Apple Computer Company), Larry Ellision (founder of Oracle Bone Inscriptions Company) and even Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft Company) became famous, HP had made full use of the opportunities in Silicon Valley and made billions of dollars to become the largest high-tech enterprise in this region.

When it comes to Silicon Valley, you can't help but mention HP; You can't talk about HP without talking about HP Labs. Hewlett-Packard Lab was founded in 1966, which is one of the earliest enterprise labs in Silicon Valley and one of the most important treasures left by the two founders. Tracing back to the establishment of HP Lab, it can be roughly attributed to the contradiction between overall R&D capability and business flexibility. In the first five years of 1960s, HP has become a large-scale high-tech enterprise with more than 9,000 employees and listed on the new york Stock Exchange, ranking among "Happiness" and "Top 500 American Enterprises". At this time, both Hewlett-Packard Company, news media and Wall Street analysts attributed HP's success to continuous innovation and R&D strength. But at the same time, with the continuous expansion of enterprise scale, the product line is getting longer and longer. In order to maintain the flexibility of decision-making and market competitiveness, Packard and Hewlett insist on dividing business departments according to product categories within HP, and respectively evaluate the profit contribution of each business department to the enterprise. -In this way, how can we not only keep the technology foresight of the enterprise, provide technology accumulation for the future development of the enterprise, but also reduce the R&D capital pressure of each business unit? How to effectively manage new technology research and development with future market prospects but difficult to divide into specific business units at present? This is really a thorny issue.

Packard and Hugh Park Jung Su came up with the idea of setting up a cross-business HP lab led by themselves. The research and development funds of HP Laboratories are uniformly controlled by the company; All financial and personnel management of HP Labs does not belong to any business department; The top leaders of HP Labs report directly to the CEO. As long as he thinks what is right, he doesn't have to look at the face of the head of any business department. All research projects of HP Lab, once successful, can be transferred to interested business departments of HP or transferred to other enterprises; In case of failure, HP will pay the "tuition fee" and will not bring any burden to the business department.

After 40 years of development, HP Lab has become a model of enterprise innovation. Perhaps, neither HP nor HP thought that the original expedient measure had become a successful model for enterprises to promote social innovation.