A Life in Invention

Xerox scientist Robert Loce talks with Jessie Scanlon on understanding the real value of patents to a company

United States patent No. 7,227,779—"Method of Selective Edge Softening and Rendering for the Suppression of Halo"—wasn't just another line on Robert Loce's CV. It was his 100th patent—a milestone the Xerox principal scientist reached several months shy of his 50th birthday. The patents, all earned since joining Xerox Research Center Webster in 1981, cover a range of inventions in the fields of digital imaging and conventional and digital optics.

While some analysts use the number of new patents a company generates as a sort of innovation score, Loce himself is quick to say that patents are only as valuable as the value they bring to the company. In other words, a patent that a company neither uses nor licenses, or that doesn't offer some competitive advantage by, say, preventing another company from using the technology in question, isn't worth much, no matter how cool it is.

"When I was 25 years old I didn't understand the real value of patents. I thought the goal was getting the patent itself rather than getting value out of it," he says. As a result, he admits, some of those early inventions might have been less useful to the company. Thanks in part to serving on a Xerox panel that evaluated which technologies were worth patenting, Loce's thinking evolved.

Loce recently spoke with senior writer Jessie Scanlon about a life of invention, the importance of failure, how to keep the mind fertile (his scientific creativity isn't waning—he has 40 more patents in the pipeline), and the difference between a cool technology and a patent that will bring true value to the corporation.

So are you one of those people who got your first patent as a teenager?

Ha. No, but I always liked science. I started as a chemistry major at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, then switched to geology, which included some study of botany and biology. At the time, only oil companies were hiring geologists and I didn't want to work for an oil company. So I got a job at a haunted house in New Jersey. Then I heard from an old friend who was working in optics, and it sounded very cool and Star Trek-like, so I went back to Rochester and started studying optics. I was 23 when I arrived at Xerox as a lab technician, and I had some good mentors who let me continue going to school while I worked here. One early manager even helped me with my homework!

What was your first patent?

It was issued in 1987. The invention was directed toward finding an inexpensive method of making the light in a photocopier uniform across the photoreceptor. I still admire the spatial thinking that went into that invention, but have to recognize that it did not bring much value to Xerox compared to more recent patents.

What about a favorite one?

It's a group of technologies related to multiplex imaging that we patented about four years ago. It's so cool. Basically, it's a color printing technology that allows us to print multiple images on top of each other and view them one at a time by shining a different color of light on the page. So you could have a piece of paper with a strange psychedelic image on it. Change the light, and the image becomes, say, a woman's face with lots of round soft features. Change the light again and it becomes a dark building made of stone. People are holding the paper and flipping it over to see where the image went!

That does sound cool. Has it been developed into a product?

Quite a few large companies contacted us but we haven't struck the right deal yet.

What's your starting point for a new research project? Do you get interested in a scientific problem or technical challenge and go from there? Or do you think about the end product or the needs of Xerox customers, and let that be your guide?

With me, inspiration comes from different places. Many of my patents came from working directly with product programs. The development team tells me "a product is going to launch but we have this problem. Can you fix it?" Or, "We're going to be developing products like this over the next few years, could you scope out some problems and solutions?"