The Human Productivity Lab is a consultancy specializing in Telepresence and Visual Collaboration, Personal and Organizational Productivity, and Sales Model Optimization. The Lab was founded by Howard S. Lichtman, a productivity-focused technologist who, while running the financial vertical sales organization at a global internetworking company, came to a number of important realizations:

In high-growth and/or rapidly changing knowledge-centric organizations you can achieve faster growth (as measured by sales, market share, and shareholder value) by investing in and improving the productivity and business communication capabilities of your existing human capital.

Increasing the return on human capital is possible by leveraging technology to improve your sales and knowledge workers ability to find, access, understand, evaluate, act on, communicate, disseminate, and archive information.

The most important and most often neglected factor in successfully implementing technology is the "Human Factor" and failing to take it into account leads to wasted time, opportunity, and treasure.

To properly test and apply these principles, Mr. Lichtman founded a skunkworks R&D operation (the original Human Productivity Lab) within the company to test and evaluate technologies and business process improvements that had the potential to improve individual or organizational productivity, accelerate the sales cycle, and/or improve business communications within the organization.

Some of the technologies the Lab rolled into production at the company were: Webconferencing, IP Videoconferencing, SMART Board Interactive Whiteboards, Blackberry Messaging, Franklin Covey Time Management, Collaboration Rooms, Cordless Headsets, and The Demonstrator, a customer education tool and trade show display designed by HSL to showcase the company's solutions for managed services and network connectivity for the financial industry.

The dissatisfaction with the traditional videoconferencing and collaboration tools on the market led Mr. Lichtman to leave Savvis in early 2001 to found Powwow Networks with the goal of creating visual collaboration environments where remote participants could be more productive than in a traditional face-to-face meeting because of the availability of intuitive, easy-to-use tools and capabilities within the environment.

Powwow Networks eventually led to telepresence and the lessons learned in implementing successful telepresence solutions for Fortune 500 clients led Mr. Lichtman to resurrect the Human Productivity Lab which was launched as a full time endeavor in September 2005.

The Lab is building a board of advisors, seeking corporate and private sponsors for its free research and dissemination activities, and private investment for a number of for-profit projects that it is looking to launch.

The Lab's planned initial expansion will feature a new website which will review technologies that provide a positive ROI in improved productivity, time savings, improved business and personal communications, and/or quality-of-life improvements.

The Lab is recruiting a tier-one "Board of Gurus" that will share and disseminate their front line expertise in business, the creative arts, and the life sciences to advance society's body of knowledge on improving individual and organizational productivity.

While the Lab is unequivocally pro-technology its enthusiasm is tempered by a firm understanding of the limits of technology especially with respect to the all too often neglected "Human Factors" of implementation.