Xerox's inventor-in-chief

An innovation revival has lifted profits to $1.2 billion. Fortune's Geoff Colvin asks CTO Sophie Vandebroek: Can the company keep it up?

There has been much ado about Hillary's appearance on Fortune Magazine's cover in July, but what caught my eye was this interview with Xerox's chief innovator.

The company's smart document technology holds much promise for the paper-glutted medical field.

clipped from money.cnn.com One key to the turnaround: Xerox has become an innovation power again, producing new technologies that can read, understand, route, and protect documents, among other things. Leading that effort is Vandebroek, 45, the company's chief technology officer since late 2005. Her task is to keep Xerox at the leading edge of infotech progress in ways that make shareholders richer. Born and raised in Belgium, Vandebroek has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Cornell; she first joined Xerox in 1991. Before an invited audience in New York City, she talked with Fortune's Geoff Colvin about the difference between invention and innovation; why Xerox employs anthropologists; how to make girls passionate about engineering; and much else. Edited excerpts:

'Green' Tech Shops Have a Way to Go

As the use of HIT rises, so does the need to conserve it's direct and indirect costs: electricity and the unhealthy methods we produce it.

clipped from news.wired.com A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the easiest, least inexpensive changes to data center operations - involving tweaks to software, layout and air conditioning - could boost efficiency by 20 percent. But even that level of improvement would still lead to higher overall electric use in the coming years. Going further, and actually reducing information-technology's strain on the electric grid, will require a more aggressive commitment. The EPA says 45 percent improvement - enough to lower electricity usage by 2011 - can be achieved with existing technologies.) For example, almost all the energy that goes into the air conditioning systems is used to run giant chillers that make the air pumped through the rooms' raised floors a brisk 55 degrees or so, sometimes as low as the 40s. Such extremely cold air is blasted in to guarantee that no single server's temperature gets much above the optimum level, which is around 70 degrees.

eHealthRisk: The Human Factor

The eHealthRisk blog is a forum for examining privacy, security, safety, project and business risks associated with the application of information and telecommunications technologies to health care.

clipped from ehealthrisk.blogspot.com The Human Factor Without question the best book I've read about human factors engineering and the issues that arise when we put human beings and technology together is The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology by Kim Vicente. Vicente has written a very readable and fascinating book drawing on real life experiences from the aviation, nuclear, health care and other high risk industries. The book is organized around the "Human-Tech Ladder" which describes a hierarchy of relationships that explains why things sometimes go wrong when humans and technology mix. The ladder looks at the following factors: Physical - Size, shape, location weight, colour, material Psychological - Information content/structure, cause/effect relations Team - Authority, communications patterns, responsibilities Organizational - Corporate culture, reward structures, staffing levels Political - Policy agenda, budget allocations, laws, regulations

Health IT Blogs All Mapped Out

This is a helpful exercise to track patterns of how bloggers piece together opinions into folksonomies.

clipped from healthtech.accordingtome.com What does the healthcare blogosphere look like? That is, how are all the healthcare IT blogs interconnected? To begin to answer this question, we’ll need some idea of the composition of health IT blogs. Fortunately we have HITSphere, a growing list of about healthcare IT blogs (now numbering about 50.)

Creativity Pure and Applied in Social Enterprise

Whether starting up a new design firm or unlocking the power of nanotechnology, creativity in business is key. But how do we move from idea to practical implementation? Join the conversation.

clipped from www.socialedge.org In a recent comment on The Edge, Prof. Ravi Arapurakal suggested there are two types of creativity, viz: creativity for generating anything new, and creativity for fulfilling a purpose. I'd like to rename those, Creativity Pure and Applied, and discuss them both here, getting into some tips and techniques. Applied creativity is creativity that is pointed in the direction of problem solving, where the problem is known in advance. Pure creativity is free-roaming, and typically introduces materials we are aware of but haven't brought into consciousness -- often in response to some deep-seated concern or issue that has been "in the back of our mind" for some time.

d.light design

From SocialEdge:

Meet Sam Goldman, the ultimate social entrepreneur. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Benin who grew up in Mauritania, Pakistan, Peru, India and Rwanda, he studied biology and environmental studies in Canada and received his MBA from Stanford.

He just launched d.light, the social venture that received best honors at the recent Global Social Venture Competition held at the University of California at Berkeley. (see video of his story)

Sam wants to provide a source of light that is safe and cheap, a decision he made when his neighbor’s son in Benin was badly burned by a kerosene lamp.

Watch Sam as he explains his goals to Global X. And read “let there d.light,” his new blog, only on Social Edge.

clipped from www.dlightdesign.com 2 Billion people in the world currently live without access to electricity. They rely on kerosene and candles for their lighting needs. These sources of light are expensive, hazardous and polluting. We believe that in an era of unprecedented technological growth, we can bring light, safety and prosperity to millions of hardworking households. We want to make kerosene lanterns a part of history, where they belong.

Morality: Your Inner Chimp

A fantastic podcast aired on April 28, 2007 and profiled on Chicago's WBEZ This American Life. Listen to more on the Science of Morality.

Turns out, when faced with moral dilemmas, there is a band of chimps in our brains, duking it out. And it requires some alpha chimp arbitration!

clipped from www.wnyc.org Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country's first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade. Then we'll move from inner chimp to outer. Dr. Frans de Waals lets us watch a chimp fight at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. And we'll turn our navel-gazing toward the furrier navels of the chimps to learn a little more about this thing called morality: where it comes from, its evolutionary benefit, and why you can't guilt-trip an ape.

Tomsitis: Every time you see a child, you want to give them a pair of shoes

Stumbled across this on Seth Godin's blog. A great model for social enterprise.

Buy one get one free

Brice points us to TOMS Shoes.

I like several things about this approach. The simplicity of the offer, first of all. If you buy a pair of these very inexpensive shoes, he gives a pair to a kid in the developing world for free. No fine print.

Second, Tom has turned the shoe into a souvenir. A post-modern shoe, a shoe for people who don't need shoes, but are happy to wear a statement. This isn't the first pair of shoes most Americans will buy, it might not even be the tenth. But it will be one that people talk about when they're wearing it.

The founder (and chief shoe dropper) is Blake Mycoskie, who, by age 30, has done more than most suburban-bred Texas kids.

From a Jan. 26, 2007 article in Time Magazine, A Shoe That Fits So Many Souls by Nadia Mustafa:

Blake Mycoskie wanted to get away from it all. After founding and running four businesses and losing by a sliver on The Amazing Race, he escaped last January to Argentina, where he learned to sail, dance the tango and play competitive polo. He also visited impoverished villages where few, if any, children had shoes. "I was sitting on a field on a farm one day, and I had an epiphany," says Mycoskie, who had taken to wearing alpargatas--resilient, lightweight slip-on shoes with a breathable canvas top and soft leather insole traditionally worn by Argentine workers. "I said, I'm going to start a shoe company, and for every pair I sell, I'm going to give one pair to a kid in need."

Blake returned to Argentina in October of 2006 with a couple of dozen volunteers to give away 10,000 pairs of Toms shoes along 2,200 miles of countryside. "I always thought I'd spend the first half of my life making money and the second half giving it away," says Mycoskie, who calls himself not ceo but chief shoe giver. "I never thought I could do both at the same time."

See video of Tom's 2006 Agentina Shoe Drop.

They Sure Don't Make Comic Books Like They Used To : Virgin Comics

From Fast Company :

"'If you told parents ten years ago in America that their children would know characters named Yu Gi Oh! and Pokemon as well as they would Spider-Man, those parents would have thought you were crazy -- yet in America today an estimated 30% of major children's animated programming is now Japanese animation,' states Sharad Devarajan, CEO of the New York headquartered Virgin Comics and Animation.

It is the recognition of this ease with which anime transcended its initial status as merely a cult phenomenon outside Japan that formed a fundamental impetus behind the founding of Devarajan's company about two years ago.

Positioning itself to redefine the comic book industry, Virgin Comics touts its mission as the creation of global comic properties that take their basis and inspiration from the east, particularly India, in a manner that resonates with both western and larger eastern audiences alike. It is the progeny of Sharad Devarajan and Suresh Seetharaman -- co-founders of another comic book company, Gotham Entertainment Group in 1997-- along with writer Deepak Chopra and acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur."