PARC showcases business models, not products, at 10 year anniversary

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is known beyond Silicon Valley for its role developing products—Ethernet, WSYIWYG editors, laser printing. But mentions of those historic heights were kept at a minimum during this week’s Power of 10 conference. The message of the day was clear with the first words to greet guests at the registration table (via both conference workers and a commemorative bookmark).

“Just wanted to let you know, ‘Xerox PARC’ is so 10 years ago. Today, we’re ‘PARC, a Xerox company.’”

PARC’s Power of 10  is a year-long series of events, including public-friendly guest presentations and this half-day conference, to commemorate the company’s first ten years of independent operation. In 2002 Xerox incorporated PARC as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary, shifting the R&D pioneers toward an open innovation business model that took center stage on Thursday.

Open innovation itself consists of companies finding ideas from both internal and external sources, then collaborating with others to implement them, theoretically sharing both risk and reward during the process. It’s not a new practice by any means, but the terminology was coined soon after PARC’s independence, with the book Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough. He’s the executive director of the Program in Open Innovation at UC Berkeley and happened to be the day’s first keynote speaker.

Chesbrough applauded PARC’s operative structure, calling it a much more connected means to innovation. To illustrate it, he compared the idea with a funnel. When a company operates with an internal focus, it limits what information comes in and channels it in one direction. But, “in open innovation, you drill holes in the funnel to let good ideas in, and out,” he noted. The openness leads to more ideas, better ideas, and ideas that become reality more quickly. In open innovation, Chesbrough sees the lead company on a product operating as more of an orchestrator than creator.

“In a world with lots of useful info and good ideas, the companies that are going to win are the ones that put this together before others do,” Chesbrough said. “You must orchestrate an ecosystem on behalf of your customers.”

Chesbrough’s point was best emphasized after his presentation. The rest of the afternoon featured panels with representatives from a few PARC-collaborators. They all shared their projects, but the most eye-catching were Nicole Tricoukes, Senior Maverick at Motorola Solutions, and Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film.

During the panel she was on, Tricoukes showcased a “deconstructed computer that you can wear on your head.” Core technologies for the product started at PARC and the Kopin Corporation developed the whole package a bit further, now working with Motorola Solutions to potentially market the item. Tricoukes sees it as a way to bring computer access into the field with on-location industries like construction. “You become Iron Man or RoboCop, practically applying augmented reality to industry problems.”

On a separate panel, Sutija said ThinFilm is in the business of printed electronics. The company is working towards creating a low-power, printable, rewritable memory that uses a non-toxic polymer and can be attached to virtually anything. “Your stuff will talk to you in three to five years,” he said.

Like the Kopin and Motorola Solutions headset, ThinFilm’s product is the culmination of multiple efforts. PARC built the logic, ThinFilm specialized in memory, another company created the display, the batteries are being developed in Berkeley. The initiative started by identifying a potentially growing consumer need for easily reproduced technology. “The ‘Internet of Things’ will involve hundreds of billions of items,” Sutija offered.