But Banerjee insists the opposite is true. In the past, he says, less than 10 per cent of HP Labs' budget went to exploratory, or "blue sky," research. Under the new plan, he says, one third of spending will be on "exploratory research," one-third on "applied research," and one-third on "advanced product development." (See below for details on one HP "blue sky" research project.)

A major thrust of HP's new strategy is increased collaboration with other companies, universities and venture capitalists. Toward that end, the company recently set up the HP IdeaLab Web site, which offers would-be partners sneak previews of research prototypes.

And in May, HP released a global request for proposals to universities seeking collaboration in each of the five major research areas. Banerjee says he's seeking real partnerships in these areas, not ad hoc, one-off joint projects such as HP might have done in the past. "Never in the past have we gone to the outside world with so much detail about what we are working on," he says.

To be sure, behind all the love of open innovation is bottom-line business sense. Such a strategy not only allows HP to cull ideas from a wider pool, it also allows the company to mitigate risk and share research costs.

Clearly, Banerjee has revenue in mind when he says, "Our approach gives us a sharper focus in the areas that we believe will help our customers addresses the challenges they will face in the next decade. It also ... speeds the time it takes to quickly turn breakthrough research into real products and services."

Either way, the change at the top of HP Labs says a lot about where the company is headed, Chesbrough says. "It's interesting that a company the size of HP would bring in, not a career engineer or scientist from the company, but an academic," he notes. "Instead of the go-it-alone attitude, I see this as evidence of a much more collaborative, distributed process. And that's a very good thing."