How Xerox Evolved From Copier Company To Creative Powerhouse
When everyone thinks you're
"just a copier company," you have to work extra hard to redefine your
mission and brand. A lesson from Xerox’s Innovation Group in granting permission
to dream.
Call it the curse of the eponym.
May it be a problem your company is
so fortunate to have: such wild, early success that your brand name becomes a
word applying to the category you’ve created or owned. And so we “Google”
things when we want to search for them online; we pass the “Kleenex” when the
tissue might be generic; and of course we “Xerox” pages when in fact we’re
using an HP photocopier. The
brand name becomes an “eponym,” in linguistic
parlance--something that makes a stamp on the English language itself.
Sophie Vandebroek, the CTO of Xerox, has had plenty of time to mull the double-edged effects
of being an eponym. Because today, Xerox does far more than make copiers. It’s
an enterprise giant whose revenues come nearly as much from services (analytics,
consulting, and the like) as from actual technology. But when Vandebroek went to an MIT career fair a few years ago, she was
surprised to see long lines at the booths for IBM and Google, but hardly a
trickle to her Xerox booth. She asked one of the students why. “Oh, you just
make copiers,” said the student. “They had no clue about all the other
businesses,” muses Vandebroek.
The next year, Vandebroek put up a
sign: “We no longer make copiers.” (It was essentially true; the company had
stopped doing significant research into plain copiers, shifting its focus to
smart multifunction devices.) It made all the difference. “We had a long line
of people at the booth saying, ‘So what do you guys do?’”
What Vandebroek does,
specifically, is head up Xerox’s Innovation Group, a post she’s held since
2006. And for the average person peering over Vandebroek’s shoulder during the
course of a day at Xerox, you might be surprised to see the kind of
creativity-fostering that we more commonly associate with small startups or
“sexier” tech companies like Google.
Take, for instance, one of Xerox’s
recent educational products: something
called Ignite. Put simply, Ignite is a
system combining hardware and software that helps teachers bring personalized education to their students. A teacher can hand
out a quiz on fractions to an entire class, say, and then scan the completed
quizzes into Ignite. Ignite then crunches the numbers to help the teacher go
beyond the fact that Johnny got a C while Sally got a B; it can specifically
direct the teacher to note that Johnny lags on multiplication while Sally lags
on division, and to store all this information in a dashboard for easy, ongoing
reference. “Teachers using the system say for the first time they can see--at a
glance--what a student needs,” Xerox scientist Eric Hamby said upon the
product’s release. The system is poised to expand into Latin American countries
soon.
How exactly does Xerox get creative
about imagining new education products and services? There are a few crucial
steps and ingredients, says
Vandebroek. First, Xerox employs ethnographic researchers to go into the “field”--in
this case, a classroom--to directly observe how teachers work and how they
might work more efficiently.
Second, Xerox engages in what
Vandebroek calls “dreaming sessions” with its clients. These are unstructured,
blue-sky rap sessions designed to get Xerox and its clients to think more
creatively about problems and solutions. A generation ago, a meeting with a
client in the educational sector might result in a simple request: Give us
faster, cheaper printers. “But they didn’t talk about a printer which could
automatically extract the data from a task, then give teachers insight into the
specific problems the children have. A teacher would never just tell you that.”
To get there, you need to “dream together,” as Vandebroek puts it--to do
deep-dive interviews, to really explore a customer’s pain points, and to think
creatively and collaboratively about solutions.
There’s one other thing that’s
crucial to getting the best, most innovative work out of Xerox employees.
“Having fun is one of the principles I always talk with new hires about,” says
Vandebroek. “Unless you have fun, you can’t truly bring your intellect, your
skills, and your deep knowledge to push the boundaries of the unknown, to
invent and create.”
She goes on: “Being innovative to me
is being both creative and entrepreneurial. And you can’t be creative and
entrepreneurial unless you truly bring your heart to work, and have fun at
work. Having fun is really essential. You need to have fun every day.”
By David Zax
http://www.fastcompany.com/3023240/most-creative-people/dreaming-together-how-xerox-keeps-big-ideas-flowing?partner=newsletter
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