Savi Baveja, President, 3D Printing & Chief Incubation Officer, HP, Inc.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and everywhere else.

Savi Bajeva is the President of 3D Printing and Chief Incubation Officer of HP, Inc.  He is also the former head of Strategy and M&A for HP.  Before that, he was with Bain & Company, the strategic consulting company, for 30 years.  Savi was attracted to his roles at HP because he felt the company had tremendous potential to unlock value from within its portfolio of capabilities. 

“There’s always some secret sauce that has been behind a company’s success, and finding that secret sauce and leveraging it…to unlock the hidden assets and capabilities drives value" – Savi Baveja

3D printing is one of the newer businesses at HP.  With commercial introduction in the 2017/2018 timeframe and producing several hundred million of annual revenue, the unit represents a successful growth initiative for HP.  Furthermore, HP’s differentiation relies on one of its core strengths: the technology that allows inkjet printheads to spray tiny agents onto a surface.  In this business, prototyping, desktop printing, and small labs are NOT the target.  It’s all about production capabilities.   

“We have one objective, and that is production.” – Savi Baveja

As such, HP’s 3D printers cost about $250K and more per unit, and after-service support is a critical customer selection criterion.  In terms of applications, historically, only one area had scaled: moulds to make dental aligners.  Orthotics, which are also inherently personalized, have been another area of traction.  Other emerging applications include end-of-arm tools for robotics, and industrial and automotive parts.  For example, custom Porsche seats are printed on HP printers. Unlike HP’s inkjet printers, materials are not a key driver of revenues: third parties make the powders, and HP mainly makes its money in equipment and services.  

In the future, fire resident powders will expand the opportunity a lot.  Furthermore, drivers of sustainability are good for business.  “Lightweighting” of the produced part consumes both less energy to make and less energy to use.  Using powdered materials is important [to sustainability], too, something that cannot be done with resins.   

Savi has enormous experience advising and leading change at large companies.  We ended with his thoughts on how to drive innovation inside a large organization.  

“Unleashing innovation is important, but the harder thing about innovation is the enabling part.  How do you enable the assets and resources of the mothership to help the incubated business to grow?  IP, technology, talent: how do you offer support and freedom?  We established an Incubation Operations Team, which is [middleware] between the mother ship and incubated businesses.  Incubation is not about “me” [the growth business] but it’s about “you” [the established business incubating innovation].  That approach got a lot of traction." – Savi Baveja