The Innovation Metric Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Used

Every public company in the technology industry measures innovation spending the same way. R&D as a percentage of revenue.

Why? Because Wall Street tracks it. Boards benchmark it. CEOs get fired over it.

And it tells you almost nothing about whether the spending is working.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard knew that. From the very beginning, they measured something different. Something the rest of the industry has been ignoring for seventy years. And the proof was sitting in a paper that Chuck House pulled out and sent to me after a conversation at a Computer History Museum board meeting.

By the end of this episode, you'll know what that metric is, why it works, and why the one everyone else uses makes it nearly impossible to tell whether your innovation investment is building the future or just burning cash.

Here's how I found it.

The Question That Wouldn't Let Go

In the last episode, I talked about the argument with Mark Hurd. The question was over whether HP should cut R&D as a percentage of revenue to match Acer. I knew Mark was fundamentally wrong. But I couldn't prove it. The only metric on the table was R&D as a percentage of revenue. That was what Wall Street expected. It's what shareholders expected. It's what the board expected.

But I couldn't argue against it, because I didn't have the data.

I needed a better metric. So I decided to go back to the beginning. HP's complete financial records dating back to the 1940s. Division by division. R&D project by R&D project. The actual operating data. I got access to all of it. The HP archive team gave me direct access to Bill and Dave's original notebooks.

Now, data alone wasn't enough. It was mountains and mountains of data, and you're trying to extract the signal. What is the trigger in that data?

The conversation that cracked it open happened outside HP.

 

 

The Man with the Medal of Defiance

I was at a Computer History Museum board meeting, standing next to Chuck House, and I shared with him the struggle I was having.

A little context on Chuck. He spent twenty-nine years at HP. He was the Corporate Engineering Director and he helped launch dozens of products. He's also the recipient, from David Packard himself, of the Medal of Defiance.

The Medal of Defiance was given to him because David had told him at one point to kill a product line. Chuck went around that decision, put the product into the catalog, shipped it, and it turned into a phenomenal success. When David gave Chuck the medal, the citation was something along the lines of: "for going above and beyond the stupidity of management and doing what was right."

Chuck and Raymond Price co-authored a book called The HP Phenomenon, published by Stanford Press. It's the deep dive into the history of the innovation culture inside HP, all of the metrics used back in the Bill and Dave days that put in place the structure that allowed HP to be successful.

By the time I'm at HP, Chuck had long since moved on. He was running Media X at Stanford, the university's research program on innovation, media, and technology. But we both served on the Computer History Museum board.

At that board meeting, I shared the argument I'd had with Mark and the search for a better metric. I had a strong feeling there was something around gross margin. That R&D investment impacted gross margin. But a feeling isn't an argument. I needed data. I needed to correlate R&D spend to margin, and that's extraordinarily hard to do when you've got all these different product lines and divisions.

Chuck got this little smile on his face and said, "I need to send you something."

The Paper an