True Innovation Meets Today’s Business Challenges Head On

By, Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox Chief Technology Officer and president, Xerox Innovation Group

We recently released our annual patent tally.  Xerox received 1,030 U.S. patents in 2011 which include patents from Xerox wholly-owned subsidiaries such as PARC, ACS and XMPie.  If we were to add the 588 U.S. patents generated by our partner in Japan, Fuji Xerox, the total would be 1,618 U.S. patents. This means that we receive over 30 patents each week and it places Xerox eighth on the IFI  Patent Intelligence list worldwide. Wow!

As impressive as these numbers are, as president of the Xerox Innovation Group, it’s the people and the innovation projects behind the numbers that truly inspire me.

I agree with renowned Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt when he said:  “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

At Xerox we’re practicing what professor Levitt describes by not only inventing, but truly innovating and making an impact to our clients’ top and bottom line. Our innovation competency not only spans the five Xerox  research centers across the world, we also collaborate with industry partners, dream with our customers, co-create with universities, conduct research pilots across the globe, from hospitals in the US to distributed business process outsourcing centers in remote villages in India.

Xerox innovation is at work helping our customers in creating more agile business processes and helping them deliver better products and services to their customers in record time.

Innovation is where the rubber meets the road – literally – as Xerox traditional imaging technology and data analytics tools are now being applied to transportation systems to optimize traffic and public transportation routes, saving municipalities money, commuters time and enabling greener cities.

And our innovation is helping people work smarter – the methodologies and expertise used inside our digital printers to enable high-speed, quality printing is now being applied to enable smart financial applications that crunch data and harvest knowledge to help financial institutions predict client behaviors and manage risks.

I am proud of the fact that while our creative people do receive a huge amount of new patents each year, at Xerox we don’t just invent. We innovate so our customers can focus on the work that matters most to them and to their customers.

Now that is something to be inspired by.