In the middle of the last decade of the last century (okay, around 1995), a small company named Creo, nestled in a quiet suburb outside Vancouver, Canada, started the development of a piece of software that was designed to change the way printing companies do their work. By and large it has done that, beyond what even the initial visionary team (that would include me) imagined it would.

If you ever tried to have something printed in the past, you would have heard the phrase "camera-ready copy." Through whatever means you desired - scrapbook, glue-gun, scissors and wax, you would bring your piece to the printer who would pin it up on a wall and take a picture of it. After that, the work entered the realm of lithographic film - a world not just of film, developer, and fixer, but of color separation filters, specialized plates of glass for halftone screening and other equipment now making its way into the museums of print.

Most of this changed when "desktop publishing" got a foothold in the print production world as a combination of the Macintosh and the LaserWriter PostScript laser printer. While the prepress areas of print shops had started to replace film workflows, desktop publishing accelerated the speed of adoption since printers had to face customers bringing 3.5" floppy disks with their work on it instead of the ill-fated camera-ready copy. Helping printers cope with the transition away from film to all-digital print production was the task Creo set itself up to do, and Prinergy was the name of the software we developed to accomplish it.

Prinergy was launched in 1999, and since then it has been installed in thousands of printing plants worldwide. Many of the magazines you see on the rack at your local grocery store, including Vanity Fair and Time, are produced through Prinergy systems operated by large printing plants, as are many of the national catalogs you receive this time of year, and many of the flyers that arrive with your daily newspaper.

Prinergy helped printers adapt to the changing world, when digital imaging quickly replaced the film-based workflows they had relied upon for years. Prinergy is now part of Kodak's Graphic Communications Group (GCG), and we're looking forward to continuing the digital momentum of GCG as we develop new software and workflow tools to make communications between people simpler and more effective.

Kodak's proud research heritage predated its creation of one of the first industrial research laboratories in 1912. For decades, that research was a significant competitive advantage in our industry, with a typical closed innovation paradigm. To quote Henry Chesbrough, "When you're targeting your technology to your current business, it's like a chess game. You know the pieces, you know what they can and cannot do. You know what your competition is going to do ... You can think out many moves in advance, and in fact you have to, if you're going to win."

I joined Kodak in 1986 as a new pawn in the Optical Engineering Department. Like many parts of the company at that time, the department had a history of "The smart people in our field work for us" - including former department head Rudolf Kingslake, who "wrote the book" on Optical System Design, and other industry notables.

Eastman Kodak Design Department c. 1965

Fast forward twenty years - our industry has evolved, and the shift to an open innovation model has become part of our transformation. As our CEO, Antonio Perez, puts it: "My philosophy is the following. No company in today's flat world can be the best at everything, therefore: 'Stick to your best and partner for the rest.'"

So now we're playing poker rather than chess... a dynamic game where we are remaining flexible, creating options for the future, and refreshing our strategy as new resources and information become available. In this environment, it is critical not only to collaborate with others, but to excel at collaboration.

Our group, Kodak External Alliances, helps Kodak business and research groups create those alliances with universities, early-stage firms and government-funded labs. We believe that our most effective alliances are those based on aligned interests. An example is our relationship with Isilon Systems, a provider of clustered storage solutions for Kodak Easyshare Gallery. As an early customer and minority investor in Isilon, we validated their technology, supporting their growth in the market - while we benefited from a highly strategic supply relationship. In addition, Isilon's December 2006 IPO was one of the year's most successful.

While successful alliances require good alignment between the two parties, they can take many structural forms. In particular, when an early stage firm works with a large corporation, it can feel like Dancing With Elephants - so in my next post I'll take a look at the elephant's steps in the dance.

For more information about Kodak External Alliances, visit our website at www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/kea/

For more information about Open Innovation: Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology by Henry William Chesbrough

The Chess v. Poker analogy is made by Chesbrough in "Managing Open Innovation", Industrial Research Institute, Jan-Feb 2004.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

Make no mistake, Kodak and the rest of the imaging industry are on a voyage of discovery. Sure, we have made lots of progress on the technologies behind the capture, organization and output of visual information. Since a Kodak engineer first invented and demonstrated a digital camera back in 1976, our technologists have made groundbreaking contributions to digital imaging. In the intervening 30 years, our industry has made tremendous progress, allowing imaging systems to interact with communications, computing, entertainment, documentation and printing systems; but we have only scratched the surface. So much remains to be done to fit these technologies together into a seamless whole (what some people call "convergence").

Beyond technology, we need to know what people want to do with these devices. Some want to capture a simple visual record, while others are striving for artistic expression; professionals want to differentiate their services and drive down costs. This is what people value; technology only matters if it helps them do that.

In this spirit, we are encouraging our scientists and engineers to share some of their most interesting experiences and challenges. You will learn about the highs and the lows involved in coming up with tomorrow's imaging technologies. But the blog is not just about broadcasting our message. We want to hear from you as you venture into some of digital imaging's latest technologies. We want to find out how technology delivers (or falls short) on its promises.

We hope that this conversation (that's what this blog is intended to be) will be a lively one and look forward to hearing your inspired responses.