Hewlett-Packard: the Flight of the Kittyhawk

What was your impression of the impact that hp’s project selection process had on number of projects underway? How do you expect hp would score on project management maturity?

1. Describe the HP organizational Culture. What are some implications of this culture for developing new innovations? What is evidence of R&D’s dominance in HP?

I will never see the day when there is not yet room for improvement. Through time, HP's focus on innovation had brought the world products such as the handheld calculator and the inkjet printer. In 1992, the company continued to invest heavily in technology, spending $1.6 billion or 10% of revenue on research and development. The high levels of investment have paid off. For three straight years, over half of HP's orders had been for products introduced within the last two years.

Hewlett Packard (HP) decided to produce 1.3-inch disk drives to become the market leader in a new market and increase HP’s revenue. Although the market for 1.3-inch disk drives was still unclear and still developing, HP decided to organize a special team to develop this new product. This group was multi-talented, with the best engineers from every department in the company. The group also had many priorities for the company. However, things didn’t develop as the Kittyhawk team expected. They failed to sell the new product to the customer they planned. Even though some new customers were interested in this

HP entered into an agreement with Compaq Computer Corporation in September 2001. In this definitive agreement, HP is going to purchase all of Compaq’s common shares outstanding, and pay a total price of 0.6325 shares of its common stock for each share of Compaq’s common stock.

HP did many things correctly when addressing the challenges for disruptive change. For instance, they organized a smaller team of “hungry” individuals from marketing, manufacturing, and research and development that moved the project away from the core group essentially acting as a small startup business. The smaller group was motivated to establish itself and prove their product was worthy of funding and upper management support. They also differentiated themselves by choosing team members that were uninterested in maintaining status in the company mainstream way of thinking. HP allowed a lot of leeway to the Kitty Hawk team in making decisions and providing financial backing to the project’s

All of these technological advances by HP receive the attention of Japan and China where HP expanded in hopes of continuing to invent newer and better technologies in the future. Since the 90’s HP has gone on to invent many other firsts like the first all-in-one device and is the first company to recycle ink cartridges. They have also acquired many smaller companies like Snapfish and Compaq to grow the company to being one of the industry leaders in personal computing. (Hewlett-Packard, 2013).

Hewlett Packard is about extending beyond the limits of classical physics and provides a quantum leap in performance, reliability and security. With the ever changing world of technology and the high demand to stay ahead of the curve, HP Labs is inventing today and for the next generation a new line of HP products and solutions. HP focuses on partnering with you, the visionary customer by solving your enterprise issues. HP has the scale, ideas, expertise and unmatched portfolio of products and services to deliver end-to-end innovation and value. We believe diversity is a key driver of our success. Putting all our differences to work across the world is a continuous journey fueled by personal leadership from everyone in our company.

Therefore, it really needed a strong product that responded the market’s needs and wants so that the product could speak itself in order to survive the keen competition.

HP, an expert in the hi-tech industry understands the fiercely competitive environment where technological and innovative advancements could create turbulent

When setting out to find a market for Kittyhawk, there were several correct and incorrect decisions that the DMD division made that greatly affected their product and its future effectiveness. They initially went about it the right way by researching the electronics industry and the several companies within the industry that might want their new product. They also spent time analyzing HP’s future product plans and how they aligned with that of Kittyhawk’s. They looked into businesses where their innovative and disruptive product may have a greater demand and be better able to quickly incorporate

It would have been good if this fundamental vision was in place right at the very beginning of the company’s formation. In the end it is the customers that make the company, so it makes sense to work towards satisfying this customer relationship. To become profitable and achieve market share are secondary objective that can be measured on a annual basis and overall company well being targets can be rewarded with incentives that link into the company’s performance as opposed to individual contribution to the company’s success.

Moreover, the products were developed based on what the company believed the consumers wanted (O’Neill 2010). The group completely forgot one of the keys of success of every company, the customers and their needs.

The business objectives that are used in HP and Cancer Research. The business objectives that are used in HP are growth objectives one of the vital objective is Profit; when I went opened the HP archive pdf file I found this objective. ‘To achieve sufficient profit to finance our company growth and to provide the resources we need to achieve our other corporate objectives’. From this objective HP most vial objective is profit as The Marketing Techniques used in HP are Growth strategies. Growth strategies are Strategy aimed at winning larger market share, even at the expense of short-term earnings. The Four broad growth strategies are diversification, product development, market penetration, and market development. Hewlett-Packard use’s diversification by introducing new products and services to new customers, HP introduced a new product into an area where it is familiar to the people you live there. Diversification is the act of introducing variety especially in investments or in the variety of goods and services is offered. HP also uses Product development to develop a new product to sell to existing customers, so if the customer buys a computer, HP might sell them an expansion pack that offers Anti-Virus up two years and then the customer has to pay for the software when the two years is up. Product development is improving an existing product or developing new kinds of products. Additionally HP also uses Market penetration as one of the Marketing techniques for growth

That innovation is fuelled by Employees First, a unique management approach that unshackles the creative energies of our 84,403 plus