Greeley Hard Copy
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? The HP organizational culture revolved around the “HP Way,” which strongly stressed consensus decision-making. While this had worked in many ways for HP in the past, this type of culture created its share of problems. Because GHC’s business is technology-driven, the culture was dominated by R&D. While the company was making the sift to give other functional areas more input as markets began to shift towards business and consumer users, the consensus decision-making culture made this a hard task. Even when there were disagreements, multifunctional teams would gravitate towards the R&D perspective just to avoid conflict and come to a unified consensus. The R&D prospective was usually chosen because of the left-over vestiges of R&D dominance. Because of this, upper management did not always know about the disagreements. Another characteristic of the culture is the pressure to hit a “home run,” especially when developing a new product.
Evidence of the R&D dominance at HP can be seen with the swipe technology. The creation of this technology alone by the R&D department at HP Labs has created demand within the company for a product that can utilize this new technology. Where a more marketing-oriented organization may look at the customer needs first and then turn to the R&D department to develop a product that fits those needs, an R&D-oriented organization like HP develops new technologies first, and then tries to find a market for the technology. Another piece of evidence that points to R&D dominance is the fact that Carau finally developed a Lobo prototype without needing a backpack to hold all of the electronics, but John Stedman seemed to be more interested in the new swipe technology.
Implications of this type of organizational culture can be seen
Evidence of the R&D dominance at HP can be seen with the swipe technology. The creation of this technology alone by the R&D department at HP Labs has created demand within the company for a product that can utilize this new technology. Where a more marketing-oriented organization may look at the customer needs first and then turn to the R&D department to develop a product that fits those needs, an R&D-oriented organization like HP develops new technologies first, and then tries to find a market for the technology. Another piece of evidence that points to R&D dominance is the fact that Carau finally developed a Lobo prototype without needing a backpack to hold all of the electronics, but John Stedman seemed to be more interested in the new swipe technology.
Implications of this type of organizational culture can be seen