In a prior article in THE EAGLE, we had suggested that the time had come for companies to encourage the adoption of technology from the outside by changing the way they paid their managers. We surmised that if equal recognition and remuneration could come from spending money, rather than just fostering internal development, better products might follow. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any movement in this direction.

However, we were heartened to read recently about a new development at Hewlett Packard. Apparently, according to the Press Release, HP is now going to centralize the function of evaluating outside technologies with the specific aim of making it easier to get such outside technology recognized for its potential and more quickly utilized to strengthen HP products. The idea seems to be based upon the thought that a central “authority” would be better able to push new technologies to be realistically evaluated, rather than to incentivize the existing organization to be more open to new ideas. The concept seems to acknowledge the reality of significant and inherent resistance to "outside" sources imbedded in the corporation. This corroborates our own experience in bringing potential new technology to larger companies in this industry.

Instead, what we normally encounter is feigned interest, but if the company has any similar technology in the works, organizational issues tend to work against innovation from the outside.