The Future of Documents

Nice initiative: test drive some of the latest Xerox Innovation  – Open Xerox is an Open Innovation space to explore Xerox technologies, interact with Xerox scientists, or even establish innovation partnerships.

Currently only one demo is available online – Natural Language Color Editing. This technology lets user use common words and phrases to change and improve color images – no need for advanced photo editing skills and tools. Nice example of making very complex technology much simpler to use and accessible, with a simpler version being part of the Xerox 7500 color printer driver.

The conference was really interesting. I was honored, thrilled (and intimidated) to be presenting along Chief Innovation Officers, Strategy VPs, and other such great presenters.

The focus was on understanding how to drive innovation into any organization – either using a top-down strategy, or, as in my case, in a bottom-up fashion. Although my presentation was outside the ”core”, I felt it was successful and very well received. Indeed, the world of “Services” (as in Professional Services) has different challenges from more traditional industries, such as repeatability and shorter cycle times. But it made my participation even more relevant and thought-provoking - and the use case of our Smarter Document Management Technologies, including Hybrid Categorizer, in which we have been able to accelerate and reuse a number of world-class innovations from Xerox research, really struck a chord.

But it was a great opportunity for learning, too, and some of the approaches or initiatives that were presented (e.g. ”Innovation Bootcamps”) were very interesting. My take on it? There is no magic recipe, but requires a mix of culture, top-down processes and ad-hoc, bottom up initiatves.

An insider’s look at PARC, the famous Palo Alto Research Center, one of the landmarks for innovation at Xerox. CNET takes us through the hallways of PARC, and although there is little mention of technologies that will shape the future of documents, it is always a very wothwhile and interesting visit…

For those of you (like me) that could not attend the Wired NextFest ”Experience the Future” event and the “Innovation Conversation”, you can find here a very interesting interview of Sophie Vanderbroek, Innovation Thought Leader and Xerox CTO.

Interesting discussion including how, for example, Xerox Innovation can have unexpected “green” applications such as applying inkjet technologies to water purification, or how other technologies can address Information Overload.