HP Innovation Journal Issue 14: Spring 2020 | Page 38

Which technological innovations
stand to have the biggest impact
on HP’s business?
PAUL BENNING
11
HP Senior Fellow and Chief Technologist,
3D Print & Microfluidics
Corvallis, Oregon
I believe our unique, internally developed technologies will
be the most impactful to HP’s business. Making predictions
about the future is risky—our best bet is to invent it our-
selves, to paraphrase Alan Kay and Dennis Gabor. The fifth
generation of our microfluidics technology is on the verge of
commercial deployment and will have a tenfold impact on
price/performance in our Inkjet print businesses, and it will
enable new classes of products in graphics. It is the platform
we will leverage to grow new business with partners in life sci-
ence research and healthcare diagnostics. We are just getting
started growing new business applications out of our microflu-
idics platform, but within the next year I see us attracting one
or two partners in those arenas. In 10 years I hope to see HP
microfluidics as the preferred technology for use inside all in
vitro diagnostics.
Our 3D print and digital manufacturing technologies have
the potential to change the world of manufacturing and put
access to the means of production into the hands of every
person on earth. In the next year we will complete the tran-
sition of our 3D machines from “printers” to full-fledged
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 14
production machines with the reliability, uniformity, and
digital process control tools required in production envi-
ronments. In five years, we will deliver on the vision of the
digital factory with end-to-end solutions that go far beyond
individual 3D machines. I look forward to seeing us lever-
age some of the same software tools to build data-centric
end-to-end business in graphics in the same time frame.
KEITH MOORE
12
HP Fellow and Head of Microfluidics Lab
Palo Alto, California
We’ll see a huge growth in IoT devices where tags are added
to everyday things. We’ll see packages having active tagging
where one can monitor what has happened to the devices
in transit (too hot, too bumpy, too cold). This will also
drive a shift where people become more concerned with
their food supply and look for authenticated provenance
(was it really organic? did it really come from a sustainable
harvest?). For this to work, we will see an entirely new set of
protocols in networking that will deal with synchronization