Apr 16, 2007 — Express Computer (April 16, 2007) Anne Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO, Xerox Corporation was in the country last week. We bring you the highlights of a roundtable where she held forth on her visit, the company's R&D and business as well as where it is headed. "With Xerox becoming the majority owner in the Indian venture it seemed liked a good time to visit India," said Mulcahy. She went on to add that she had taken the opportunity to listen to the team and gain insights on what Xerox can do to share in the tremendous market opportunity that India presents. "We do some software development in India and take advantage of offshoring," she commented.
R&D: two patents a day
With Xerox PARC being top of mind many questions were thrown about the company's R&D activities and its commercialisation of the same. Dr. Sophie Vandebroek, Chief Technology Officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group for Xerox Corporation was also present and she mentioned the fact that the company has four R&D centres and works closely with Fuji Xerox. "Xerox gets two patents per day. We have 50,000 historical patents," she added. In 2006, Xerox committed $922 million, or about 6 percent of revenue to Research, Development and Engineering. When the inevitable question was raised about Xerox's historic inability to commercialise ground-breaking research at PARC, Mulcahy said, "That's history. Today we commercialise our investments in R&D very effectively." She went on to state that the company even has R&D sponsors-external clients who fund R&D in non-competing areas. Vandebroek added, "Xerox not only invented the Net but was the first to commercialise it. 75 percent of our research is aligned with our current solutions. The rest is beyond inks and toners." She gave the example of the company's incubation fund that lets researchers submit breakthrough ideas. Xerox provides a wide agenda for R&D. Mulcahy said that when they asked some of Xerox's most proficient inventors what needed to be done to get more innovation, they said that the answer was to not manage things so much. Vandebroek said, "We incubate products with customers. We did this with the reimaging document. We call this Dreaming with the Customer." Mulcahy added that, "Sometimes we are surprised by the customer's feedback."
Research at Xerox falls into two areas:
- Smart document management
The company works with large enterprises, legal, medical, banking users to examine how business processes work today and how you can do them faster at a lower cost. - Scanning and printing
In printing technology the company is exploring printing on electronic materials that can be erased and reused