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PARC Moves Beyond Just Document Research
Now that it's semifree of Xerox, the legendary PARC labs looks to expand its innovation.
InternetNews.com, April 29, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
Despite all of the great inventions to come from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) – Ethernet, object-oriented programming, the laser printer – it will forever be known as the place where a young Steve Jobs saw the first graphical user interface and was smarter than Xerox executives in seeing its potential.
Well, they are not going to let that happen again.
Spun off from Xerox in 2002 as a wholly owned subsidiary but still independent, PARC is now a research center dedicated not just to dreaming up new technologies but with a much clearer plan about bringing them to market. For starters, if Xerox doesn't want it then PARC will find a partner that will help it productize the invention.
"No project can get past a certain point without a value proposition," Mark Bernstein, head of PARC, told InternetNews.com. There will be no sitting on their hands like with the GUI so many years ago. "We are free to pursue other options with all of the projects we have."
But, he added, there is a purpose to every project. "It's not like I put an envelope to my head and say 'today we are going into biofuels,'" Bernstein said. "It's got to be important. We're not interested in creating a technology that's looking for a demand."
Today, Xerox funds only about 50 percent of the work that goes on with PARC funding the other half through licenses to other corporations, research partnerships and government grants.
On Monday of this week, the company opened the doors to a press day, where it showed off demos of what it has under development. No longer just a development arm for a document firm, PARC is expanding into areas that its former parent company would never consider.
For example, one project called Rare Cell Detection is a joint venture with The Scripps Research Institute, the largest biomedical research center in the country...
Another initiative involved developing cost-effective methods of water filtration without a membrane filter...
...other project is with SolFocus, a startup that makes solar concentrators...
...Intelligent Document Redaction technology can scan a document and automatically black out certain keywords...
None of these technologies had anything even close to a release date. Release dates of four, five, six years or more were offered from the different projects. But they will see the light of day eventually and solve a problem, Bernstein said. "Our mission is the marrying of researcher insight with the desire to have a real impact on the world," he said.
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