Lawrence Lee - PARC blog

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 ...

Defining (and spotting) ‘disruptive’ innovation

9 July 2012 | Lawrence Lee

John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that "The iPhone is not and never was a phone. It is a pocket-sized computer that obviates the phone. The iPhone is to cell phones what the Mac was to typewriters." His point is that the iPhone wasn’t a disruptor of mobile phones; instead, the iPhone was a disruptor of portable computers, and that’s how we should have viewed it all along... and foreseen its evolution into the iPad and its resulting impact on the computing industry. First: a quick clarification. A 'disruptive' technology typically starts at the low- (or under-served) end of the market – not perceived as a threat to incumbents – and eventually displaces the existing market. But don't the incumbent companies see what's happening? Sure they do. But it’s hard to see competition from disruptive "substitutes" outside one's industry, and even harder to figure out what to do about it. However, those of us who work in innovation need to recognize such blind spots and exploit the opportunities presented by them as often as we can.

From lean startups to open innovation success

28 July 2011 | Lawrence Lee

A startup is any organization of any size dedicated to creating something new under conditions of uncertainty; the challenge is how to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a path to a successful, sustainable business. I'm not going to restate all of the points in Eric Ries' PARC Forum talk -- you can watch it here -- instead, I want to share how we’ve been practicing similar concepts at PARC and compare and contrast some specific Lean Startup methods with our practices in Open Innovation. One key difference for example is in the strategy of MVP.

Managing research as an investment portfolio

22 February 2011 | Lawrence Lee

[contributed post to Xconomy] How do we balance the seemingly conflicting goals of long-term research vs. short-term profits, of creating breakthrough innovations vs. providing client services, of diversifying research into many markets vs. developing critical mass in just a few?

The quest for the perfect news reader

2 August 2010 | Lawrence Lee

Don't get me wrong, I think aggregators like Flipboard offer a great way to read content from your social information streams. But is it the best way to get your news? Or let me put it this way: are you doing yourself a disservice when you only read news that comes to your attention through your friends? Frankly my friends’ interests don’t necessarily overlap with my own, and the cumulative interests of my friends doesn’t exactly cover all of my interests. The ideal news reader...

Enabling news companies as content curators

27 July 2010 | Lawrence Lee

There's a feast and a famine in news today: we're getting too much news too fast and struggle to filter quality information from noise, and/or we struggle to find high-quality, relevant content along our individual long tail interests. Curation is one way to deal with this problem. But sharing is not necessarily curating. The best curation requires domain knowledge and strategic thinking to organize topics with a purpose and point of view for the curated collection. What's missing: an effective, scalable way to do this across the Web. This is a huge opportunity, especially for news companies.

Augmented Reality: Increasing collective intelligence

23 July 2009 | Lawrence Lee

Search engines like Google have trained us to believe we can find the answer to any question. Now activity streams from Twitter, Facebook, and others are changing our expectations around information yet again. We now demand information in real-time that’s socially and contextually relevant. Contextual information transforms our interactions within our physical environment... This area of research is called Augmented Reality, and it spans a wide spectrum of applications...