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By Kate Hanaghan, 12 June 2001 15:40

NEWS HP has said the UK educational system is stifling the inventiveness of its students. In a white paper, entitled Inventing for business success, the US company blamed the system's relentless focus on academic success and a steady job for suffocating the drive of inventive people. HP's research also claims there is not enough adequate support for inventors who want to make their ideas a commercial success. Carly Fiorina, chairman, president and CEO of HP, today addressed an audience of business executives at a CBI conference where she spoke about HP's ambition to re-invent itself and put people at the centre of what it does. She said: "People cannot be pushed or ignored - they must be inspired and brought to life. A re-invented organisation is really an organism composed at the cellular level of people - not technology, budgets or factories." Fiorina said that during the 1980s and 1990s, traditional HP values had been "re-interpreted into a self-limiting doctrine which turned HP into a follower". When Fiorina joined the company in 1999 it was made up of 83 operating units and had 1,500 internal websites for employee training alone. These were symptoms of how cumbersome the company had become and one of the reasons for its slowdown. Fiorina's appearance at the CBI conference, her first in the UK since being made CEO, follows recent HP profit warnings on third quarter results.