Welcome to the Xerox Innovation page. I'm Sophie Vandebroek, Chief Technology
Officer for Xerox.
Xerox researchers and business teams worldwide have been delighting our customers by creating new products and services.
The mission of the global research centers, which I lead for Xerox, is to "pioneer high-impact technologies that enable us to lead in our core markets and to create future markets for Xerox".
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Today's global businesses face many challenges. Now more than ever, we are looking for ways to deliver more value to our customers and higher profits to our stakeholders, while creating an environment where it is fun to explore ideas, incubate concepts and partner with all value-chain members in bringing high-impact products and services into our customer's hands. At Xerox we believe our continued focus on innovation allows us to do so.
History of Innovation
Xerox has a proud tradition of pioneering research and continues to be in the forefront of innovation. Chester Carlson's invention of xerography, more than 70 years ago was an extraordinary milestone in the development of the modern information age as now individuals could much more easily share and access information.
Xerox has a rich history of innovation. As the inventors of Ethernet over 30 years ago, we helped build the foundation for today's Internet. In fact, not known to many, the Ethernet's first commercialization was as a communication bus in our production publishing systems in the early 1990s.
Our heritage of innovation continues to flourish. Xerox has 5000 scientists and engineers worldwide. We also have many excellent open innovation partnerships. The most important one is our joint-venture partner Fuji Xerox in Japan which was established in 1962. Together Xerox Group invests $1.4 B in R&D each year. We have been issued over 50 thousand patents worldwide; and are issued 2 patents each and every day. This is a clear indication of the creativity and innovative spirit of our scientists and engineers.
These new ideas and patents contribute directly to our business model. Our focus on innovation has resulted in the most prolific product and services introductions in Xerox history. Today, two-thirds of our equipment revenue is from products launched in the last two years. In that time, we introduced 63 new products and dozens of new services, earning more than 500 industry product awards and dozens of science and technology awards.
We've also received the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) corporate innovation award. the Product Design and Management Association's Corporate Innovator of the year Award, and the National Medal of Technology given by the President of the United States. This external recognition is a clear indication of the quality of the research and the capabilities of our scientists world-wide.
Innovation Drives Profitable Growth
I don't have to tell you that today we are operating in a tough business environment - both in our own industry and in the context of global businesses. Customers continue to expect novel products and services and shareholders expect to see growth. There are cost pressures in all of our markets. At the same time we are coping with - and driving - fast evolving technology trends. In this flattening world, it is critical to continuously innovate in order to continue to create customer value. The status quo is not an option. The Xerox research labs innovate in order to do one of three things:
- We must continue to differentiate the products and services Xerox offers to our customers. Here we are often focused on high-impact technologies that enable revenue growth such as services that simplify document-intensive business processes; affordable color for the office and small and medium businesses, or applications for personalized printing and publishing. We also see great things ahead with our environmentally-friendly solid ink printing technology, continuing to find ways for this exciting marking technology to serve our current customers and expand into commercial markets.
- The outcome of our research must also produce technologies that disrupt the existing cost of the product or service. These cost reductions can then allow us to compete within the market price reduction pressures. One great example of such an innovation is the tightly integrated parallel processing technology that we introduced in the Nuvera 288 two months ago, a breakthrough cut-sheet duplex printing speed of 288 ppm is reached with high reliability at affordable cost. Other examples include the recently launched image services platform and especially the intelligent document technologies which are now being deployed and which significant reduce the cost out of handling documents while creating whole new revenue opportunities for our customers. These services are impacting legal, public sector, manufacturing and health care customers today.
- It is a key part of our role in research to investigate ways our core competencies and technologies can be applied to new markets and create new businesses for Xerox. For example, where can our vast reservoir of knowledge about printing, personalized imaging, intelligent documents be applied? We have several research projects looking at this, including experimenting with printing materials different then inks and toners, or looking at environmentally-friendly media different then paper and exploring next-generation personalized services. The result here is innovation that has the potential to create completely new businesses.
Xerox Research's Unique Roles
I'd like to give you a little more detail about the unique roles that the researchers perform.
I like to think of our global research centers as spearheading Xerox innovation. For this role it is essential that our core competencies are state of the art. Across our centers we constantly bring top-notch people with strategic skills and we also look for the best university or other open innovation partnerships. While dreaming with customers and performing ethnographic studies, our researchers uncover solutions to customer's problems either leveraging today's technology or technology that is being invented. That involves exploring new technologies, identifying and assessing disruptive technologies and building business insight in co-creation with customers. About 25% of our investments in the research centers is in this important "explore" phase. Most of the explore projects are only a handful or less researchers in size working with university or other global partners.
The explore projects will give us great learning and help us strengthen our core competency. Some of the explore projects are very promising. These must be scaled up, and their level of uncertainty reduced. We move them to what we call the "incubation" phase. About 35% of our investments in the research centers is devoted to incubating and nurturing these promising opportunities.
 During this phase we make sure that close alignment of the opportunity with one of our lines-of-businesses product roadmaps happens. We pilot and mature these opportunities until they are ready to become a product or a services development program in one of our business groups. At that point the role of our researchers become that of a "partner".
About 40% of our research investments directly support our business partners. Our researchers collaborate closely with the development engineers in the business groups to accelerate time to market through co-development of the novel technologies in the early stages of the product and services development processes, including of course applying our expertise to problem solving as needed. Innovation only happens when the novel product or service hits the market and makes a difference to our customers. Hence investing 40% of our overall research portfolio in this important phase is a good thing to do.
As you can see these three roles are very important. They allow us to constantly create and explore novel ideas, incubate them, and then successfully transfer them into our business team so they can become true innovations and create customers value and hence attractive economic returns for Xerox.
In summary, Xerox is charting the course that will enable customers continue to do great work, today, tomorrow and in years to come. Seeing the world in new ways, and successfully innovating is in our blood. Xerox has the technology foundation and the strong roadmap for the future to continue our leadership as one of the world's top technology innovators.
We do our utmost to make our research vision of "being the Innovation Spearhead for Xerox, our Customers and The World" a reality.
Please enjoy your visit to the Xerox Innovation site. I look forward to your feedback
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