HP receding from Silicon Valley-style innovation?

It’s too early to tell whether the latest cuts at Hewlett-Packard will severely reduce its role as a big-time player of innovation in Silicon Valley. But here’s the latest inside skinny about how the HP Labs in Palo Alto is doing, in today’s Mercury News story (link requires free registration, and you’ll get links to full audio files, etc; but if want to skip registration and the other stuff, just go here). Merc’s reporter Therese Poletti will be following this closely.

This comes after we’ve been hearing, in our rounds talking with VCs, about how distant the HP corporate development group is in developing relationships. Granted, this is only anecdotal, but the venture folks over at Partech International in San Francisco recently told us they never hear from HP, but they get an update from the venture folks at IBM “every six months.”