Hewlett-Packard leads in region’s innovation

Computer company fosters employee invention ideas

When it comes to receiving patents on innovations, no one in Northern Colorado comes close to Hewlett-Packard Co.

Last year, H-P engineers working in Fort Collins, Greeley and Loveland were awarded 176 patents for their ideas and inventions. H-P’s closest competitor, Heska Corp. in Fort Collins, received 25 patents in 2000.

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H-P, a worldwide manufacturer of semiconductor chips and computer equipment based in Palo Alto, Calif., received a total of 901 patents last year.

The company that added the word “invent” to its corporate logo two years ago is intent on breaking into the top 10 companies that receive patents each year. Last year, H-P finished 16th.

“That’s one of the aspects of changing the company logo a couple of years ago,´ said Steve Fox, H-P’s assistant general counsel and director of intellectual properties. “We’ve changed our mode in heightening our patent activity. We’re doing that by plumbing the minds of inventors through innovative technologies — workshops and discussion groups — to gather ideas from our inventors.”

Inventors encouraged

David Boyd, an H-P inventor in Fort Collins, is one of those employees upon whom the company is pinning its future earnings and success. Boyd, a 17-year engineer who recently joined H-P’s legal department, has 16 patents under his belt and more pending.

“I’ve kind of lost track,´ said Boyd, a tall, bearded and soft-spoken man who’s focused his inventive talents mainly on improving the company’s scanner technology but who’s also helped develop other H-P innovations.

Boyd’s focus on scanners came about through fate and good timing.

“I was assigned to the development team of the first color scanner at H-P,” he said. “Since it was new, there were lots of opportunities to improve it.”

Boyd said he appreciates H-P’s encouragement of invention in the work place.

“That’s what makes H-P so innovative — having bright people who are challenged to come up with novel ideas,” he said. “The environment creates the opportunities.”

Incentives offered

Fox said praise for employees has always been at the heart of inspiring H-P inventors, but now there’s been another incentive added: cold cash.

Those who submit ideas for possible patenting are awarded $175, and if the idea goes on to be filed as a patent application the submitter gets an additional $1,750.

“It does attract the attention of our inventors,” Fox said.

In addition to the cash incentives, H-P spends about $2.7 billion annually on research and development, Fox noted.

“That’s a lot of money in R&D,” he said. “There are a lot of very creative minds working in R&D and our job is to capture them and protect them.”

Last week, a team of researchers at H-P’s laboratories in Palo Alto was awarded a patent for what Technology Review magazine called “one of the top five patents to watch in the future.” The team, led by Philip Kuekes and P. Stanley Williams, has developed a molecular electronics process that could revolutionize the computer industry.

“We’ve received two key patents and have several more pending that we believe will eventually enable computers to be millions of times more efficient than they are today,” Williams said in an H-P press release, adding that a prototype molecular memory system would be produced by 2005.

Technology Review magazine deputy editor David Rotman said the discovery highlights the significance of H-P’s recent patent efforts.

“Nowhere have the advances been more impressive or the ambitions greater than at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California,” Rotman wrote in the magazine’s May 2001 issue.

Long view taken

Fox said H-P takes the long view when applying for a patent, which is granted for 20 years.

“The intent is to look not only at innovations for our next generation of products,” he said, “but also to be more forward-looking in creating products that haven’t even been designed yet in the labs but that we know will be needed in the marketplace somewhere downstream.”

Fox said the hardest work in securing new patents is not so much in the fostering of new ideas but in the “capture” of those ideas. H-P’s stepped-up efforts to gather patentable ideas is evident, he said, in the fact that the company collected about 10,000 invention ideas last year — about three times more than in 1999.

Those resulted in about 3,000 patent applications being filed in 2000, a 30 percent increase over 1999.

“The number of patents filed is an indication of our increased patent activity,” Fox said.

Fox noted that Northern Colorado is a fertile ground for new patent ideas: While H-P’s Colorado locations employ about 4 percent of the company’s global work force, H-P inventors in Colorado generated about 20 percent of the company’s patents last year.

H-P employee Boyd said a patentable idea can sometimes be incredibly simple.

“Sometimes, it’s ‘we should have thought of this before.'” he said. “But one of the things of getting a patent is it can’t be obvious to someone of ordinary skill (in the field).”

While the financial incentives are nice, Boyd said the best thing about getting a patent is to see it someday result in a new product or process.

“I still remember the first time I got a magazine and it had an ad with a product I designed,” he said. “That was one of the best days in my life as an engineer.”