Dan Farber: Scott, thanks for joining me.
Scott Elrod: Glad to be here.
Dan Farber: PARC, which was formally Xerox PARC, has a very storied history. It is the source of innovation for things like the Graphical User Interface, Ethernet and laser jet printing and a lot has happened since then. In 2002, PARC became a subsidiary of Xerox.
Scott Elrod: That's right.
Dan Farber: What are the big focuses right now?
Scott Elrod: Being spun out as a separate company, a number of things have changed. One, we now have a much broader charter to look at new areas. We continue to do work for Xerox--about 50 percent of our activity is aimed at their longer-term research needs--but we have also chartered whole new programs. One of those is in bio-medical devices and the other one, the one that I am most involved with is clean tech.
Dan Farber: Now, your area of specialty in part has been in ink jet printing. Now you are taking that technology and moving it into the clean-tech space. What's involved with that?
Scott Elrod: They may sound like unlikely connection. My history is doing ink jet printing, so it's about putting drops down on paper to form images. What we have found is that in the clean-tech space, where cost is paramount--you have to get solutions that are very low cost because the need is to proliferate them so widely in the world--printing turns out to be a really powerful technique to go to the ultimate low cost in whatever kind of device you want to make. If you can apply printing approaches to photovoltaic, for example, that will get you to a lower price point per watt and make the proliferation of photovoltaic even broader.
Dan Farber: So you are talking about basically spraying photovoltaic material across acres?
Scott Elrod: That's one idea. We are not actually doing that. What we've done is, based on the history of doing ink jet and other kind of marking technologies as we call them, we have actually invented a completely new method for putting the front metal lines on solar cells. If you take a look at a solar cell in a panel you will see there are these little silver lines. Those are essential to pull the current or the electricity out of the cell. One of the big issues with them is they tend to be too wide. They are done using screen printing, which is a standard method used in industry, but they tend to be too wide so they shadow the sunlight. Less sunlight reaches the solar cell than could otherwise if the lines were more narrow. We invented a completely new method. It's not ink jet. It's not anything that has ever existed before, but it's based on those competencies that we were able to come up with that.
Dan Farber: Is that technology out of the lab and into commercial use?
Scott Elrod: It's almost there. We have a partner--a photovoltaic manufacturing company that is funding PARC to do the last part of the work. They are going to receive the first process tool, and PARC is right in the midst of spinning out a company that would commercialize both the equipment and the materials that would do that. The benefit, that one simple step doing it more effectively, it's six to eight percent relative efficiency improvement. If you can do that for the same cost as the current method of printing those lines, it is basically six to eight percent additional profit for the PV manufactures.
Dan Farber: You are also doing bio-medical research. What are some of the innovations that you are working on now?
Scott Elrod: Those also tie to some of the historical competencies. You mentioned the laser printer; PARC is the place where that was invented. We have worked closely with Scripts, the Scripts Research Institute in La Jolla. We didn't have any bio-medical expertise. We had a lot of capability in hardware and software, so we partnered with them and they have helped us understand some of the important problems in the bio-medical space. Once we understand the problems, then we can unleash the researchers on trying to generate a really creative solution to solve it. The example that I would offer that relates to laser printing is of a method for detecting rare cells in the blood stream. If a person has cancer, there typically will be a few cells that are shed from that tumor and that are circulating in the blood stream. The fraction of those cells is really low. One in ten million cells will be one of these rare cancer cells. We've come up with a method of using a laser to very rapidly scan slides and find those cells--locate them very quickly--so then you can go analyze them more deeply. This is a factor of 100 faster than any method on the market today.
Dan Farber: PARC has been around for nearly forty years.
Scott Elrod: Thirty-eight actually.
Dan Farber: It is a culture of innovation; it is in Silicon Valley. How do you really maintain that level of productivity and keeping people really at the edge of innovation?
Scott Elrod: That is a really good question. We reflect on that a lot because we are asked by everybody, ''How do you that? How do you continue to do that in today's world?'' Several components to that--it's really about who you hire. We have a very rigorous hiring process. We interview lots of candidates. We have many people do the interviews and we try to actually include people from different laboratories interviewing a candidate for a given position. We say it is something about the nervous system of the person. It is about their curiosity and their passion and their intellect. It is a hard thing to quantify, but by interviewing candidates and seeing how things work out over time, I think we have been able to really home in on what characteristics you want in a researcher. We rely on the research community to really generate many of the ideas. The clean-tech initiative was really based on some researchers who got together and wanted to see if they could direct their work toward issues of environmental concern. It wasn't a management top-down decision--''We're going to go after clean tech.'' It was actually a study group and some forum series that the researchers chartered which led to that initiative.
Dan Farber: It would seem that over the last decade or two that hiring researchers might be a little bit difficult because of companies like Google, a lot of people went into Hedge Funds and are doing higher math in the Hedge Funds. How do you deal with that issue, which is when there are so many other opportunities where people can have better cafeterias and make more money in this kind of facility?
Scott Elrod: One of the things that I think is really unique about PARC is the ability of a researcher to work on a broad set of different projects. I started at PARC in ink jet; I then went onto work on large area displays for remote collaboration. That was spun out as a company called Live Works. I then went on to work on some more ink jet, and then ultimately became manger of a lab. Now I have been responsible for helping with the clean-tech activities. There is an ability to move around among different teams, different project topics, and also different business models. In particular, today we are working with Xerox, as we have in the past. We're working with other large companies, and that is really the dominant tenant of the business model--to provide longer-term research to large corporations--but we also have startups. We have startups that we find and have been working with, including ones that we have brought into PARC and incubated there. We also have technologies that we are spinning out, PARC technologies that get spun out. There are a lot of different choices for a person at different stages in one's career. A person might be interested in going with a spin out--we have that possibility. They might want to work on projects for large companies--we have that. There is really diversity and ability to flow through these different projects and business models that I think is pretty interesting about PARC.
Dan Farber: Finally, let me ask you about one product--from either Xerox or from PARC--which is erasable paper. Is there really a chance of getting rid of using trees for books and other kinds of products?
Scott Elrod: This is really interesting project. It is one PARC collaborates on with Xerox. We do the hardware and Xerox's research center in Toronto, Canada is doing the development of the material. It really hinges on the material--this is a coating that you put on a normal piece of paper which is sensitive to light. You can write on it with ultraviolet light. If you write on it with at UV LED for example, the image emerges. It is called a photo-chromic material, sort of like the material used in sunglasses that turn gray when you are out in the sunlight. This project was motivated actually by studies that had been done which showed that between 20-40 percent of the prints that people make in the office are used and then discarded after 1-3 days.
Dan Farber: I heard a trillion pages are printed per year.
Scott Elrod: Total pages, yes. The amount of paper printed is huge. If you can make a dent of five or ten percent or twenty percent in that, that's a very big impact. This observation--how people actually use paper--we started thinking about how you might make prints which would disappear after 2 or 3 days and where the substrate, the paper, could be put back in the printer and reused. I do think it's very possible that we can come out with a product. This is still in the research phase within Xerox. We are doing focus groups with users right now in multiple cities around the world. One of the findings is that people want the image to last at a certain level of darkness or contrast for maybe three days. Right now the chemistry doesn't get us there, but we have ways we think we can make it work. If that happens, then I think it could be a very interesting product.
Dan Farber: Scott, thanks very much for speaking with me.
Scott Elrod: Glad to be here.
Dan Farber: I have been speaking with Scott Elrod, who is the Vice President and Director of the Hardware Systems Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching.
