HP Innovation Summit – Barcelona 2019

Just back from a fascinating two days at HP’s European Centre at Sant Cugat, Barcelona, where they hosted their Innovation Summit 2019 – an opportunity for customers, channel partners, industry analysts and the media to learn more about some of the new developments and thinking coming out of HP.

The first thing to say is that Sant Cugat is an impressive facility, with over 1,500 staff from more than 50 nationalities, driving new developments across a wide range of HP’s products and services, including the worldwide centre for 3D Printing.

The scope and level of resources deployed gives meaning to HP’s three pillar strategy, with Growth and Future Development to build on the existing Core businesses, and provide a development path and vision not just for the next 3-5 years, but two or three decades ahead.

In the print world we talk a lot about declining page volumes in the office, and the need to develop new revenue streams. Almost all the OEMs, and many channel partners recognise this, and are exploring potential new business areas. However, what we see from HP is a bigger scale of investment in substantial new businesses which leverage existing technologies, and which appear to put it in a different league to many of its competitors.

At the same time, HP does not lose sight of its heritage, and of the values of its founders, which remain as relevant today as when the company started, 80 years ago this year. 

It was illuminating to see, in the same day, both a compelling vision from Shane Wall, CTO, of the future impact of megatrends, bringing together developments in technology, socioeconomics and demographics, and a replica of the humble Palo Alto garage where HP started, which symbolises the ethos of the company.

Moving to some of the specific products and new ideas presented, I will start with the one closest to our area of office print. We all know that Supplies is a hot topic at present. We saw this from a different angle with a presentation on the science behind printer ink from one of HP’s leading Inkologists.

This was brought to life with an analogy in which he compared the quality of a cocktail made from genuine, high quality natural ingredients, with one using cheap, generic spirits and powdered flavouring.

In the print world, this translated into real differences between genuine and third party consumables, both in image quality and durability, and in printer reliability.