archive for the ‘our processes & culture’ category

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 ...

How To Get From A Great Idea To Actual Innovation

4 April 2012 | Stephen Hoover

[contributed to Fast Company] "There's a tendency for all of us to glorify the ideation process when in fact it's the reduction to practice that's perhaps more important," says Stephen Hoover, CEO of PARC, a Xerox company.

What we’re reading

15 March 2012 | Editor

[Winter 2011/ Spring 2012] Here's the latest "flash-sampling" of what books some of our folks happened to be reading... and why

Videos you can watch anywhere: Experts on a variety of topics

21 December 2011 | Editor

PARC Forum is our invited expert speaker series -- and public platform -- for exchanging insights and building relationships with leading experts in a variety of areas. An amazing variety of speakers including Nobel Prize laureates, CEOs, industry-leading thought leaders and other personalities have spoken in the series since 1977. You can watch recent videos on our website at www.parc.com/forum and on our Slideshare channel (in HTML5 and mobile viewable on iPads, iPhones, Android devices).

What we’re reading

22 August 2011 | Editor

[Summer/Fall 2011] People are our greatest asset. And PARC is often asked for expertise about its various domains -- spanning physical, computational, social, and life sciences -- as well as a "trend-setter's" perspective on what's next. But what are WE paying attention to or learning about? Well, here's a "flash-sampling" of what our folks happen to be reading just now -- books, magazines, blogs -- and why...

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.

Making work visible: For business practice transformation

19 April 2011 | Peggy Szymanski

"Murky" can describe problems in organizations where you see the cloudy fog obscuring what you’re trying to get at, but you don’t know what’s behind it. "Wicked" can describe problems in organizations that are too tangled to tease apart, politically loaded, or just plain difficult. Whether you want to tactically address an acute process problem in a specific department, or strategically transform the way an entire company fundamentally operates, learns new practices, or engages at the critical "customer front", ethnography-based work practice study is a powerful tool for making work visible...

How to build a cleantech portfolio (or: just about anything)

6 April 2011 | Scott Elrod

[contributed post to SmartPlanet] When PARC, a Xerox company, became an independent subsidiary in 2002, we were free to consider entirely new directions and industries. Cleantech was one of our first efforts to take the deep competencies and expertise we cultivated solely for Xerox, and apply them to problems and needs for other clients. But how did we align our idealistic motivations – concern for the environment, desire for impact – with commercial realities? Here are some of the strategies that helped us resolve conflicting goals and move from possibility, to reality... including knowing WHAT to start, and knowing WHEN to stop.

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?

Mythbusting: Corporate ethnography and the giant green button

20 December 2010 | Editor

[contributed article to UXMag] Because ethnography provides a complete, nuanced, and valid picture of people’s practices, processes, and product use in context, it’s a powerful tool that can provide actionable insight and reduce corporate R&D risk. The pioneering use of social scientists in technology corporations -- often referred to as corporate ethnography -- has largely been attributed to, well, us. But this isn't intended to be a who-begat-whom post. We're just trying to set the record straight on the popular tale of ethnography at PARC, because the way the story unfolds reveals how powerful a tool it can be...