Last week, after the formal part of HP Labs event, I sat down with Labs' director Prith Banerjee (pictured, courtesy Raija Rapo) and talked in more details about the latest changes inside HP's corporate research arm.

I actually met with Banerjee a little after he joined the company 6 months ago and had almost the exact same pitch than during last week's press conference.

So why did it take 6 months to get the new vision out the door?

"I needed 6 months to get the buying [from the lab employees]. Now everybody is on board. Because they [the researchers] analysed it. They had so much discussions about it... 6 months ago I said we will do these areas of research. The way we came up with these areas of research is we asked the researchers for what do they things the themes should be... They had lots of ideas... Then we used BRAIN technology within Labs to get collective intelligence and agreed on these 23 lab themes. Once we announced the labs. Researchers were not assigned to a lab... I told them you can pick 3 labs you want to work in, the top 3 choices... lab directors were given the choice top pick their top 30 researchers [out of 600]... And the results was 88% matching of employees first choice and lab directors first choice... By the time you get to 3rd choice, it's like 99% matching".