SriG's Blog

I owe a great deal of my perspective on innovation and invention to my years at HP Labs India. With its charter of “innovating for the next billion,” HP Labs India was, above all, a product and solution concept factory—something like a design house, but with a few critical differences that remain surprisingly relevant today.

Ten years of HP Labs India has seen some of the most meaningful, responsible and sensible technologies to flow out of an MNC-funded R&D outfit in India.

— Anand Parthasarathy, IndiaTechOnline, September 9, 2012

What distinguished this environment was not only what we worked on, but how the work was structured.

We were not given design briefs. Instead, we relied on user research, ethnographic methods, and prolonged immersion to surface pain points and unmet needs. Problems were discovered, not assigned. Today this might be described as discovery-led or problem-first innovation, but at the time it was simply how the work began.

We also deliberately chose problems whose solutions demanded genuine technological and design advances. These were not incremental improvements waiting to be productized. Many required foundational work before applied solutions were even conceivable.

The organization itself was structured around projects rather than functions. Teams were genuinely multidisciplinary, bringing together user researchers, interaction designers, technologists, software architects, developers, and people thinking about business models—working together for the full duration of a project. This avoided many of the handoff failures that continue to plague innovation efforts today.

That said, the challenges we encountered are familiar to anyone working on innovation, then or now.

Some of the product and solution concepts depended on technologies that did not yet exist in usable form. Handwriting and speech recognition in Indic languages, for example, lacked training data and supporting infrastructure. We had to build corpora and conduct foundational research before applied work could begin. Progress was slow, systems were brittle, and success came incrementally.

Even when the technology worked, the path to market was often unclear. HP was, and remains, largely a hardware company. Many of the solutions we explored—software, services, or hybrid offerings aimed at populations at the edge of affordability—did not align cleanly with its go-to-market machinery. Estimating opportunity size was difficult, and without clear demand signals it was hard for a large organization to commit sustained investment, particularly outside its core DNA.

In some cases, the only viable way forward was licensing intellectual property or transferring assets externally.

We also misjudged the speed of change. We did not fully anticipate how quickly large populations would move from limited connectivity to widespread access via internet-enabled mobile phones. In hindsight, this was less a failure of imagination than a reminder of how difficult it is to reason about non-linear adoption.

We see this pattern playing out again today with Generative AI. Early expectations oscillated between skepticism and exuberance, often grounded in linear thinking: cautious pilots, narrow use cases, or assumptions that adoption would be gated by organizational readiness. Instead, the technology crossed a threshold of usability and accessibility, and adoption followed a sharply discontinuous curve – reshaping workflows, roles, and expectations far faster than many organizations anticipated. As before, the challenge has been less about invention than about timing, integration, and institutional response.

On the positive side, our work at HP Labs India contributed to lasting foundations: shared linguistic resources, open-source tools, research communities, and intellectual property. These outcomes aligned well with the traditional metrics of a research lab, but their broader influence extended beyond any single product or organization.

The broader lesson for innovation is one that continues to repeat itself. Product–market fit matters as much as technical elegance. A credible path to market must be owned, not assumed. Organizations innovate most easily near their core, and struggle when venturing far beyond it. Exploring entirely new markets from within an existing structure is possible—but exceptionally hard.

Although HP Labs India ceased to exist as an independent entity in 2013 after eleven years of operation, the style of contextually rooted, problem-first innovation it practiced lives on in the work of its alumni—across startups, research labs, product organizations, and public institutions.

In that sense, the most durable outcome was not any single technology, but a way of working that remains relevant everywhere—and perhaps especially now.

-SriG