HP Open Innovation Contest

This week began accepting applications for participation in the Program of Innovative Research (Innovation Research Program) HP. For the second year, the main research center of our company, HP Labs, has been holding this competition, open to teams of scientists from universities and research institutes around the world. Igor Belousov, the head of the Russian Institute of Technology HP, told me some interesting details.

The idea of ​​the competition is to support the most worthy projects in the fields of knowledge traditionally developed by HP Labs. Any university or state research center may submit a brief application describing its project until 4 am on March 3 (Moscow time). Within two months, a jury consisting of HP Labs specialists (laboratories in 7 countries around the world, including St. Petersburg) will select winners who will receive financial support from HP in the amount of $ 50 to $ 75 thousand for a period of 1 year. Support may be extended for up to 3 years if the project is successful enough and will remain within the framework of the company's requirements.

Among the requirements for the submitted project: it should be completely new and original, contain a clear research plan for the year and, if possible, should attract investment in the university itself or from a third party.

Last year, 450 applications from 200 institutes representing 28 countries of the world were submitted to the competition. The winners and recipients of grants were 45 teams, among which were two teams from Russia - from the Institute of Systems
Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences and St. Petersburg State University . Along with them, world science centers such as MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, the Universities of Munich and Bangalore also received grants.
')
This year the themes of the projects are defined as follows:

• Analysis
• Cloud
• Content conversion
• Digital commercial printing
• Immersive interaction
• Information management
• Intellectual infrastructure
• Sustainability.

A detailed description of the topics see here: HPL IRP Topics_2009.pdf . Igor Belousov believes that the strongest applications from Russia can be expected from theorists, algorithms, specialists in high-performance computing and the preparation of personalized digital publications

The rules for the application are described in a special guide , but the Office of Open Innovations is always ready to support this. Applications are submitted via the form on the Program website. You can ask your questions in the comments on the HPort blog .

One of the slogans of Hewlett-Packard is very simple: Invent . So let's invent something together.