A Life in Invention

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But I also get ideas by working on my own or just thinking about technology trends. Then there are ideas that just come out of nowhere. The other day I was out walking and saw a golf tee and I thought, that's an interesting shape, I wonder if I could incorporate it into an optical device. So I made something called an illumination blocker in the same shape. If you put it in the center of a lens, it makes the light projected very uniform.

Many of your patents have been developed in collaboration with cross-disciplinary teams. Is that chance or do you believe that the most interesting inventions come out of cross-disciplinary research?

These days it's hard to come up with a really useful widget. You have to integrate what you're doing into a system. And when you're working with a system you have to work with experts in multiple fields. So, for instance, I'm an imaging scientist, but I might need to work with experts in sensors and programming and actuators. To have an invention that's really critical, you need people with different skills working together.

When you work independently of a product team—in other words, when they haven't come to you with a problem—do you then also get involved in trying to bring that patent to market?

Occasionally I'm part of the product team that actually helps develop a finished product. Other times I've invented something, and thrown it over the wall to good engineers who improve my idea and get it to work. Finally, if a Xerox product team isn't interested, I work with the Xerox licensing department to find an outside organization interested in the technology.

That flexibility must help you stay fresh and excited about your research. But from a corporate perspective, is there pressure to work according to a more standard process—the scientists do science, the product development teams do products, etc.?

At Xerox I wouldn't say that there is a standard process. Some people are just more comfortable working close to a product or they like the adrenaline rush [of working under a shipping deadline]. Some people are made nervous by the hard deadlines and so they tend to stay in the lab.

Let's talk about inspiration. How do you keep your mind fertile?

Well, there are a few things. Xerox has a program that allows scientists to volunteer in public schools. So I teach a range of subjects, from mechanical physics to geology to frog dissection at Dewitt Road School in Webster, N.Y. It really does keep you fresh, having to sit with 4th graders. Their questions are so off the wall. I also spend a lot of time in the mountains. I just took my sons camping for the first time. A desk and computer seem really special after a weekend of being lost in the wilderness.

What percentage of your 100 patents have found their way into a product or service, either at Xerox or through a licensing deal?

Maybe 40% or 50% have been used in a Xerox product or licensed. I haven't counted. But let me say that as a research scientist you have to be very comfortable with failure. I've had managers say unless we're failing 20% of the time, we're not being aggressive enough. Some of my favorite inventions have never been used.

Also, whether or not a patent is actually used by Xerox doesn't fully describe the value of it. A patent is really a contract you have with the government to prevent others from doing your idea.

So a patent could be a sort of defensive move?

Yes, in the late 1980s, Xerox was issued a patent on one of my inventions that sat dormant for quite a while. At some point I told a person in our legal department to not bother paying the maintenance fees on that patent because it did not seem to bring Xerox any value. But it turned out that a competitor had approached us on this patent. For some reason we did not work out a licensing agreement. As a result, this competitor didn't fully implement the feature that they desired. Also it took quite a while for them to bring their scaled-down version of the feature to market. So, our patent seems to have blocked their use of a technology and might have resulted in longer development to work around our patent.

What sparked that different thinking?

After some of my first patents, I was lucky enough to be put on a panel that evaluated whether ideas were patent-worthy, and I was taught the criteria: How is this patent going to bring value to Xerox? Will it protect one of our products? Will it bring a partner to the table for licensing?

It sounds like every Xerox scientist—and for that matter, every corporate researcher—should get that training. Does Xerox try to expose all of its scientists to the evaluation process?

Many of us participate, though I wouldn't say everybody. Of course, there's feedback between the evaluation panels and the inventors so that they understand how and why decisions are made. Our research labs are pretty tightly coupled with our legal departments.

Is that recent? Xerox—or at least Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center—is known for developing some of the breakthrough innovations of the early personal computer industry in the seventies and then letting Apple walk off and commercialize them.

Maybe it's that legacy that makes us hypersensitive. Maybe that's why we review our ideas so seriously. There's an old book titled Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. That smarts! And I think we've learned from it and have become more astute because of it.