Co-innovation with Academia Date:   Wednesday , April 04, 2012 Meera Sampath, Director – Xerox Innovation Lab, India talks about the company’s strategy of co-innovating with academia to bring out new solutions to market. How are the academic programs at Xerox in tandem with the Innovation Lab? Open innovation is a concept that spells, "not all the smart people work for you but you can work with them". As these are extended parts of the Xerox family, we have research projects in which researchers in Xerox not only in India center but also centers in other parts of the world work on specific research projects which are part of our overall research portfolio. These are done with the professors and students of the universities we have relationships with. So, we work on projects which are of mutual interest to us. We try to come up with solutions to some of our basic research problems which we need to solve in order to have an impact on our businesses. These research projects should also be theoretically appealing for the universities to go for. Therefore, it is not different from the work that we do in-house except that the people who do research are not part of the Xerox employee but definitely a part of Xerox’s larger research. What are some of the challenges that you come across especially on cloud computing considering it has huge market today? Challenges will depend on which area on research we focus on. For example, in the emerging markets, when we develop solutions for them we need to take into account many of the well known problems that we already have. Problems like infrastructure limitations, network and connectivity related issues, we have to understand that these markets have a very different value-price quota. Even though cost is a key attribute for a product or a service anywhere in the world, some of these problems are much more pronounced in the emerging markets. After that we do what it takes in addressing these above mentioned challenges. In turn develop cost effective solutions that will not only work for this market but for any other market. Finally this will be made available in the global context. The second challenge is the research we are working on that is to leverage the vast and growing rural workforce. Rural BPO as we know is the key trend. If we have to leverage the rural BPO to do the kind of business process outsourcing that is today done inside of large enterprises, we need to address some unique research challenges like security. How to take a job that is customer sensitive, client sensitive information and still send it out to a team that is not part of the workforce without compromising on quality, security, while at the same time achieving significant work quality metrics. Today emerging markets can offer a tremendous access to a growing workforce. As we know, India is projected to have the largest workforce in the coming decades. How do you see the whole research scenario in India academically as well as corporations kept in mind? Filing for patents has never really been an issue for us as we have a very strong supporting organization. Xerox has around 56 thousand worldwide patents. We have researchers in our labs that have around 150 patents individually. Xerox works with international IP organizations for our patent drafting. So, we have patents from both our research labs as well as academic division partners. Logistically, filing and signing patents have never been an issue for us. There is shortage in terms of the number of people who take up research oriented jobs. However, we make sure we have the best researchers on board. What is the road map for innovation now? We have a small team now which is growing. We have a vision and a road map made on where we want to go in terms of our technology and our businesses. We are keen on building the competencies and connections for now. Depending on all these we would execute a solution for this. We are building a whole ecosystem of innovation which we will witness here in India. In addition to the core research center that we are building in India we are also building a global innovation hub which will have people from across the globe. These people are thereby connected to the best people in India who are working on both the emerging markets as well as global markets. (As told to Vishwas Nair)