Inside view: The ideas man at HP

He is the man who convinces people to buy with their minds but use with their hearts.

SHANGHAI: Phil McKinney is the idea man at HP and the driving force for the company’s new direction. According to him, he goes through 2,000 raw ideas a year, short lists 150 of them. Then he chooses 20 of those for the initial funding phase. This is the man who is responsible for the three or four projects and ideas that HP makes sure to launch every year.

McKinney’s official designation however, is not half as cool as his actual job description. He is the Vice President and Chief Technology officer, Personal systems group for HP. However he said that he gets a surprising amount of leeway from HP to do what he wants. And they happy way in which he said it made it clear that it made up for the lack of a cool title by far.

He said that his team and he would pick up on ideas which are ‘trending’ around the world. To do this the team would take “trend safaris”. These safaris would see the team spend a lot of time focusing on a region conducting surveys and looking at where the money was being spent so that the company could give the people what they needed, wanted and were willing to spend money on – presumably because anything worth doing is worth making money off of as well.

When asked to give an example, he began talking about a trip they guys had taken to India. The team spent a lot of time looking at what the Indian people really wanted, they conducted surveys and looked at the sample population’s spending habits. They found out that the population wanted three things; education, communication and entertainment in that particular order of importance, so Phil and the gang came up with the Dreamscreen.

Mckinney explained that the Dreamscreen was intended for people who had never used a computer and needed to take the first giant leap of faith that would take them in the direction where they would be able to use a computer. It basically allowed the less tech savy people to access communications, study and some entertainment as well.

Its basically an all in one PC even though the company might prefer to not call it that. It comes with a decently sized 18.5-inch touchscreen display that supports a resolution of 1366x768. The screen, along with the PC hardware, fits into a single piece of molded plastic.

However, an interesting thing happened, according to McKinney. This product would be painfully bought with the people’s hard earned money for the education of their children. But HP, which was getting feedback from the device found out that the majority of the time it was being used for something else. One guess; entertainment.

It seemed that the children would be away from the house for a significant period of time. Which meant the cats would come out to play. The grandparents and mothers would use if for their entertainment needs, since it was also perfectly capable of delivering that end of the bargain.

“They would buy with their minds, but they would use based on their passions,” said McKinney.

So what is the ideas man planning for 2011



Phil McKinney see’s a very smart future ahead of us. He believes that the world does not need new products that do more. He believes that the world will move towards products that are aware of each other and can make certain decisions as a result of their being interconnected.

So, your phone would work in conjunction with your house, you would be able to control certain functions at home with it. Phil also showed us a watch. It was designed to be the hub of all communications for all HP devices. For example, texts, emails, voice, chats; notifications for everything would show up on the watch so that one could see if it was worth their time or not.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2011.