ENGH 302
Xerox Research Question Examples (SLO-4)

One option begins with the question of why Xerox failed to successfully commercialize the technology it developed at Parc.  Several preliminary questions that might come out of this material are:  1) Did Xerox Blow It; 2) Why did Xerox Blow It (using Hiltik's Epilogue title); 3) Why was Apple more successful in developing some of the technology; and 4) How does the Clayton Christensen's distinction between continuing and disruptive innovation help us understand Xerox's failure and Apple's success?  We will watch the video interview with Clayton Christensen at http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/ to set up a brief discussion of how you can use a framing idea from a respected source (Christensen teaches at the Harvard Business School) as you refine your research question.    

We will then discuss the pros and cons of these questions and others you can think of as well as how these questions might be refined as you continued to do research and work on the paper.  One option for narrowing the focus here would be to explore why Xerox failed to market one particular device like the Alto (Xerox's first PC).  Hiltzik emphasizes organizational issues and there is a lot of material available on this point.  See for example the Bitsavers.org collection of Xerox documents, now on the Internet Achieve.  After doing some preliminary reading, in other words, a key step is to narrow your focus and come up with a manageable research question on a specific topic that can be tied to larger issues but that you will explore in a more specific and limited way in your paper.