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5 big questions on innovation

Eugene Xiong, Founder and Chairman of the Board

Eugene founded Foxit Software Incorporated in 2001 and has been the company's president and CEO. Under Eugene's leadership, the company is growing rapidly, employs hundreds of employees worldwide, and has become a worldwide leader in PDF and electronic document technology and solutions. Before founding Foxit, Eugene worked at Bexcom Corporation and at China's National Astronomical Observatory, where he participated...
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How is your team changing the game within your industry sector?

First we work with an organizational chart to make sure everyone has clear responsibilities and also has support from other colleagues. It’s important for people to understand their role in the company so they can feel empowered to make decisions, including some that might be non-conventional. Secondly, we promote customer and market oriented evaluation of people’s performance, so they will treat outside input very seriously instead of looking inward all the time. This view allows for fresh ideas to flow into the company. Last but not least, we make a strong effort to encourage innovative work, including handing out recognition and awards.

What are some of the biggest impediments to innovation in your organization or industry sector?

As organizations grow, it takes more and more people to change processes in order to implement an idea. with each added personal layer or filter, it becomes a little more difficult to move an idea forward. Also, innovative ideas often don’t bring in short term results.

How has innovation become engrained in your organization's culture, and how is it being optimized?

We are introducing the Baldrige Excellence Framework to Foxit, a big perspective of this framework is innovation. We are associating innovation with every aspect of our operation, including strategy, customer relationships, process management, valuation, improvement, and of course, results.

What technologies, business models, and trends will drive the biggest changes in your industry over the next two years?

We believe cloud technologies will the biggest driver in our industry for the near term. Not only are people moving data onto the cloud, they will move all applications on the cloud as well. Also, a lot of new use cases will arise because of cloud adoption. In the longer-term future, we also believe AI will drive very big changes to our industry as well, allowing applications and services to help people working with their documents more efficiently, and do more.

Can you share a specific innovation strategy you’ve recently encountered which you find compelling?

Foxit implemented a web-based PDF engine and through continuous innovation we made it very efficient. Right now we have the most efficient PDF engine on the web, and based on this engine, we have built web-based PDF applications that can be deployed and managed within enterprises easily. This also supports our innovative ConnectedPDF technology, which allows documents to be protected, tracked and managed across all use cases.

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5 big questions on innovation

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