Technology and Innovation Key to Navigating Business through Challenging Times: Xerox Continues Commitment to R&D

Technology and Innovation Key to Navigating Business through Challenging Times: Xerox Continues Commitment to R&D

Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) says a steadfast commitment to research and development is one way to help survive tough economic times. Just last year, Xerox and its inventors earned 609 U.S. utility patents, exceeding a commitment to increase the company’s annual number of awarded patents by one-third.
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* U.S. Patent No. 7,377,971 covers low energy solid inks and was used in the Phaser® 8860. This innovation will also help reduce energy consumption.

* U.S. Patent No. 7,413,842, which covers advanced emulsion aggregation (EA) toner technology that allowed the extension of the use of EA toners to high-end office products. EA toner yields sharper image quality, higher reliability and reduced toner usage in an energy efficient manufacturing process. Pages printed with EA toner use 40 percent to 50 percent less material than conventional toner.

* U. S. Patent No. 7,382,993, which proposes a method for controlling image quality consistency between print engines operating in parallel. The technology improves engine-to-engine toner reproduction consistency in the Xerox Nuvera® production system.

* U.S. Patent No 7,370,034, which is the basis for TrueMatch Search and Retrieval, enables users to scan a document, then locate and send the corresponding original electronic version to their e-mail account and print a fresh copy.

These four are awesome! Well done, team. But what about the other 605?

Xerox University anyone?

Here's a snippet from a recent discussion over at Print Ceo Blog,"

Quality of the patents are much more important than the quantity.

Maybe if the investment community gets the idea that a company is wasting money on useless patents as a form of marketing, they may not look on the high numbers of patents so positively.

If you interested in the full conversation, which is actually pretty interesting, you can get to it here. The topic on the table is "Investing in Heideberg". There are lots of things to consider with a simple search and replace as in "Investing in Xerox, Canon, Oce, HP, Kodak, etc." It's always the same story. Just the cast of characters are different.