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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 »

The Palo Alto Research Center, the famed Silicon Valley research institution that popularized things like the computer mouse to the laser printer, has decided to open its doors to more aggressively nurture entrepreneurs.

PARC, founded by Xerox in 1970 for internal research, is now an independently operating subsidiary of the company. Its innovations are numerous, from the early personal computer Alto to ubiquitous computing.

However, one criticism of PARC is that it was never able to bring products conceived in its lab quickly enough to market. Other, venture backed entrepreneurs usually ate PARC’s lunch.

Over the decades, PARC has incubated about a dozen companies. A new program called Startup@PARC, however, could incubate the same number of companies in just a year or two. PARC will work work with several companies at once, and has issued a formal application process here to kick it off.

Here’s how it works: First, a business contract is signed. This consists of an agreement for cash, equity or royalties (PARC has no guidance for the amount it wants to invest; it depends on the technology and its promise). In return, startups will have full access to over a hundred researchers on an as-needed basis, although they will not be required to move into the center. The difference between PARC and other incubators (think Plug&Play, YCombinator, etc) will be the center’s scientific and engineering expertise, Nitin Parekh, the director of business development, told me during an interview. PARC can also assist in the design process, up to the first stages of manufacturing, and is willing to share its own intellectual property.

More recently, PARC’s research projects in search and solar technology have boosted companies that have licensed it, Powerset and SolFocus, respectively.

SolFocus, which develops mirrors to focus sunlight onto solar cells, grew from two to over 50 employees within the walls of PARC, before moving out. Other successes have included Inxight and ContentGuard, both recently acquired.

PARC’s partnership with SolFocus came about through a “serendipitous” connection, a conversation that occurred at the right time and place. The new program differs in that there is a formal application process, and PARC is interested in working with several companies at once, making it more akin to a traditional incubator.

Going forward, PARC doesn’t have any specific type of startups in mind for the program, Parekh told me. “We’ve got such a wide area of competencies,” he said. When pressed, he did say the center is particularly eager and qualified to support cleantech, large-area electronic displays, constraint based reasoning systems, and human information interaction — colloquially known as Web 2.0.