Abstract:
PARC, a Xerox company, is in the Business of Breakthroughs®. Practicing a unique model of open innovation, it provides custom R&D services, technology expertise, best practices, and intellectual property to Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, startups, and government agencies. Through this work, PARC found that open innovation is a powerful framework to navigate through the unexpected. It allows us to target long-term technology trajectories without the constraint of short-term priorities. It makes it possible to recognize and leverage unforeseen outcomes of research, and rapidly commercialize them with partners. It also makes it possible to connect solutions from disparate fields for very specific, immediate client goals. Connecting technologies, ideas and players is especially impactful in emerging fields where ecosystems and value chains are not yet in established. Examples of such areas are at the intersection of the future of electronics and additive manufacturing, disruptive photonics and optoelectronics technologies, the democratization of energy, and novel networking infrastructures. PARC is engaged with electronics, printing and packaging companies to explore a new generation of hybrid printed electronics devices that have the potential to expand the Internet of Things. PARC also works with automotive and consumer product partners to create unique miniaturized optical and photonics system solutions enabling new sensing modalities; for example, monitoring conditions inside batteries or enabling hyperspectral resolution imaging in consumer-level devices. For these clients and partners, open innovation allows the creation of new business options, acceleration of time to market, amplification of internal capabilities and, very importantly, reduction of risk.