Innovation and RD&E
Xerox has a rich heritage of innovation, and it continues to be not only a core strength of the company but also a competitive differentiator. Our investments in innovation align with its growth opportunities in areas such as business services, color printing and customized communication. Our overall aim is to create value for our customers, for our shareholders and for our people by influencing the future in key areas. Four innovation themes emerge in our research portfolio; they are detailed to the right.
Implementing Agile Business Processes
In today’s fast-paced and rapidly evolving marketplace, flexibility is required to operate efficiently and effectively. Xerox innovation investments are focused on automating business processes through flexible platforms that run on scalable infrastructures, speeding up and simplifying the ways work gets done, anywhere and at any time. By infusing more agility into business processes, clients benefit from our research on image, video and natural language processing coupled with machine learning.
Harvesting Knowledge from Information
Information comes in two forms: structured, where the content sits tidily in searchable indices or in limiting databases; or unstructured, where content can be anything from photos, videos, hand-written forms, emails, etc. The unstructured information has endless growth and creates a need for businesses to be more effective in mining context from content. This is a key research area for us – making sense of unstructured information using natural language processing and semantic analysis. We explore how to better analyze information for human use by better understanding contextual detail on how the content has been created and used. We’re also developing proprietary methods for predictive analytics applied to business processes.
Delivering the Value of Personalization
Our research leads to technologies that improve the efficiency, economics and relevancy of business communications and printing applications. We research methods to create affordable ubiquitous color printing, leveraging our solid ink printing technology. We’re also exploring ways to expand the application space of digital printing to cover new applications such as packaging printing and printing directly on mediums that go far beyond paper, like foods and clothing.
Enabling the Sustainable Enterprise
Our research also focuses on developing technologies that minimize the environmental impact of document systems and business processes. An example is our solid ink technology, which produces up to 90 percent less waste than comparable color laser devices, as well as our MPS software, which helps our customers reduce energy and paper use.
Xerox Global Research Centers
Investment in R&D is critical for competitiveness in our fast-paced markets. One of the ways that we maintain our market leadership is through strategic coordination of our R&D with Fuji Xerox (an equity investment in which we maintain a 25 percent ownership interest). We have aligned our R&D
investment portfolio with our growth initiatives, including accelerating our color transition and enhancing customer value by building on our Services leadership.
Sustaining engineering expenses, which are the hardware engineering and software development costs we incur after we launch a product, are included in our RD&E expenses.
