What’s in a Name? A Lot. PARC, a Xerox company

16 April 2013 | Amy Hawman

By many measures, last week was an amazing week of visibility here at PARC – Tuesday’s New York Times Science cover article on our amazing chiplet technology by John Markoff, Wednesday’s expert interview on American Public Media’s Marketplace program, and Thursday’s PARC Forum discussion featuring Larry Vincent and Eric Kuhn from the United Talent Agency moderated by the illustrious Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Ok, Kara gave us a little Twitter beef about being “too quiet” and we weren’t on 60 Minutes (yet), but we’ll take it anyway.

And yet we had to remind NYT that we are “PARC, a Xerox company” not “Xerox PARC” when the article went live on Monday evening, despite multiple visits and interviews, so we’re definitely not where we want to be or need to be yet. It may seem like a small semantic issue, but to those of us chartered with building and maintaining the ...

Society’s Next Big Challenge: Infinite Data

14 April 2013 | Christian Fritz

Over the past 10 years or so, many organizations have recognized the conceptual value of data and have started recording and retaining more and more of it. But after doing this for a while, they’re asking, “What the heck do we do with it?”

Google, Netflix, and other big companies have taught us that data is valuable for insights that can be obtained from it, so others have started exploring their own data and want to do more with it. Some companies have been doing this in a way that sets no expectation as to what can be learned from it.

Rather than starting with a question and looking for an answer, people started finding the questions data was already answering. The idea has been to find the hidden potential of data, and we’ve already seen benefits to doing this type of analysis.

Fixed Data or Fixed Problem?

What if ...

Recharging Japan’s Dominance in Lithium-ion Batteries

19 March 2013 | Leon Wong

Japan has an incredibly strong history of innovation. Yet the country too often starts out with dominant market share only to lose leadership as the pace of innovation quickens.

For example, its world market share of Lithium-ion Batteries (LiB) for mobile and portable devices declined ~60% in 19 years. Solar panels ~30% in 4 years. DRAMs ~55% in 15 years. DVD players ~70% in 9 years. LCDs ~80% in 7 years. Car navigation systems ~80% in 5 years. In none of these industries has any meaningful market share loss been recovered. Now, their world market share in Lithium-ion batteries (LiB) for vehicles has dropped ~20% in the past 5 years. While Japan’s share is still a robust ~80%, Japan’s track record forebodes an unhappy ending.

In light of this history, I recently attended the Battery Japan 2013 conference (part of Japan’s World Smart Energy Week 2013, which drew over 75,000 ...

What We’ve Learned at PARC About the Business of Innovation

14 March 2013 | Stephen Hoover

The business of open innovation is something PARC has been continually refining since we incorporated in 2002. Mastering the process of innovation is about far more than developing new technology; it requires a deep understanding of human behavior and context, and the ability to invent new business models to take the resulting products and services to market. We’ve found common themes. Three of them illustrate how we’ve been innovating at PARC over the past decade.

2012 Golden Acorn Awards Recognize PARC Innovations

15 January 2013 | Editor

In 2012 PARC celebrated 10 years of practicing open innovation, a major milestone since being incorporated as an independent subsidiary of Xerox in 2002. That same year PARC also instituted the Golden Acorn Awards, an annual award program to recognize excellence in patenting. The awards reflect the significance of intellectual property to PARC’s business model and the importance of individual leadership in its creation.

PARC is a place where the “entrepreneurial scientist” thrives — people with that rare combination of a passion for deep research, a pioneering spirit, and the business savvy of an entrepreneur. Nominated by a peer-based group and then selected by PARC’s senior team, the recipients of the 2012 Golden Acorn Awards truly embody our culture with their groundbreaking and industry-leading work.

The following PARC inventors have made considerable contributions to PARC’s intellectual assets and demonstrated excellent patent practice and are recipients of the 2012 Golden Acorn ...

PARC Innovations Update (2012 #5) – Innovations and Inventions With Impact

21 December 2012 | Editor

This is the archive entry for our e-mail newsletter, PARC Innovations Update.  [subscribe]

INVENTIONS WITH IMPACT:  PARC, IPS, and Motorola Solutions

PARC and Intelligent Product Solutions (IPS) recently announced the launch of the IPS Entervise™ solution for the Motorola Solutions HC1 headset computer. Entervise, a voice-driven, hands-free remote field service solution, is fully integrated with Motorola’s HC1 headset computer.

PARC provides the core augmented reality technology embedded in the back-end server software, which runs the communications, compression, security, and algorithms needed to send, receive, and annotate audio, video, text, and voice in real time.

read the article “Heads Up, Hands On” by Nicole Daphne Tricoukes, Senior Maverick in charge of the Motorola HC1 Headset Computer program
read news release

DEVELOPMENT:  PARC Awarded California Energy Commission Grant to Treat Wastewater 

PARC was chosen by the California Energy Commission to receive a $1 million grant to demonstrate a new ...

Picking a Cleantech Winner

15 November 2012 | Leon Wong

The Cleantech Open 2012 Global Forum, the spectacular “Academy Awards of Cleantech,” is one of the industry’s premier cleantech entrepreneurship events, drawing entrepreneurs, business leaders, government officials, and media from all over the world as both attendees and exhibitors.

I have been attending this event for the last few years and this year I was one of eight judges (from the investment, industry and academia communities) for the final round of the Air, Water, Waste category award. Eight startups presented and answered our questions in front of a live spectator audience. However, after the last company pitch, the audience and companies were shuffled out of the room while we deliberated on ranking the startups and choosing the winner. What happens in a judging room stays in the judging room. Seriously though, I have several key takeaways that will be useful for entrepreneurs in any industry.

Know your limitations
Specifically, knowing ...

Why Making Things Still Matters

14 November 2012 | Stephen Hoover

Innovation and the desire for innovation are nationally and globally pervasive. But by any measure of geographic or economic density, most of us still see Silicon Valley as the leader and lodestar of innovation.

It’s interesting to take a moment and reflect on the very name Silicon Valley. It is, after all, named after a chemical element and a technology for making things. At its roots, Silicon Valley was about making transistors, integrated circuits and chips, and, of course, the application of these for computing and software.

Today much of Silicon Valley is focused on the evolution of software and computing innovations, which take the form of Social, Mobile, Big Data, Cloud, and App economies. These are in fact tremendous innovation opportunities that can and will deliver great value—and we need it, all of it. This trend is pretty much true across U.S. regional technology centers. However, all of this ...

Heads Up, Hands On

22 October 2012 | Editor, on behalf of guest contributor

By Nicole Daphne Tricoukes, Senior Maverick in charge of the Motorola HC1 Headset Computer program

What does it take to bring an innovative idea to life?

Well, first a great idea. Then, it requires a proven framework and resources to help champion it through the development process. And sometimes, external expertise helps turn the concept into an actionable, revenue-generating opportunity.

Our idea? To redefine hands-free mobility and change how people interact with their mobile computers by creating a new category of device. One that is lightweight, stylish and intelligently allows users to access and view business-critical documents and complex schematics with just a simple voice command or turn of the head; or to quickly and simply collaborate with remote team members. No hands, laptop or fixed mobile workstation required.

That’s the power of the new HC1 headset computer from Motorola Solutions. This exciting new mobile computing concept delivers true ...

What PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

16 October 2012 | Lawrence Lee

The concept of open innovation has moved from business phrase to business reality over the last ten years.

When PARC became a for-profit subsidiary of Xerox to practice open innovation in 2002, Henry Chesbrough had not yet published his book Open Innovation and the concept was not well understood. Companies knew how to engage a design firm, license IP, and form joint ventures, but few knew how to truly co-develop innovations with external partners, such as PARC.

At that time it was hard for PARC to understand how much we needed to invest in a new technology before approaching partners to work together in commercialization. We always wanted to get a partner sooner rather than later, in order to share risk and learn more quickly. However, we learned the difficult lesson that unless we could clearly articulate the maturity level and value proposition for a new technology within the context ...