The famed Palo Alto Research Center opened its doors to journalists today to show off a bunch of research projects from smart documents to cleantech.
Mark Bernstein, head of PARC, told me today that no interviewer ever forgets to ask about how Xerox fumbled the future by failing to commercialize the technologies behind the personal computer that built companies like Apple. But he says the R&D center — the birthplace of the laser printer and Ethernet networking — is determined to commercialize its inventions through its business groups and leverage its 165 researchers in Palo Alto. Now the projects that PARC and other Xerox R&D labs showed off could be licensed by a venture-funded start-up or other big tech companies. Hence, it makes sense for the company to publicize some of the research as widely as it possibly can.
Xerox spun out PARC in 2002. Back then, it funded 100 percent of the research. But today, Xerox funds only about 50 percent of the work. The rest is financed through licenses to other corporations, research partnerships with big companies, and government grants. Chris Morrison recently wrote about it.
Xerox itself has had more than 55,000 patents in its history and still gets 10 a day, said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox’s chief technolog officer. But the research isn’t scattered. It zeroes in on environmental technology, mass customization, and smart documents. Xerox invests $1.5 billion a year in R&D and it has more than 800 researchers. Over the last three decades, PARC’s technology has spawned 40 spin-offs.
Here is a summary of the projects that I saw today:
Eraseable Paper was one of the most interesting demos I saw. Think of the old invisible ink with lemon juice. Researchers Eric Shrader of PARC and Paul Smith of Xerox’s Toronto lab showed how they could save a lot of wasted paper printouts by using the same pieces of paper over and over again. Shrader noted that 44.5 percent of all documents printed are used just one time before they are tossed out. These include directions, emails, calendar pages, and cover sheets. At PARC itself, about a quarter of the time the papers are recycled the same day they are printed. Studies show it takes about 204,000 joules of energy to make a piece of paper. It takes 114,000 joules to make a piece of recycled paper. But it only costs 2,000 joules to print one sheet of paper. Hence, if you can print over and over again on one piece of paper, you can save a lot of energy. Read the rest of this entry »
