Gloss Marks and Correlation Marks address a tough problem: how to secure a document for "a run length of one," says Reiner Eschbach, a lab manager at Xerox.

Conventional techniques such as holograms can give pretty good security at a reasonable price for thousands of credit cards containing the same hologram. But putting a unique hologram on a single card, while technically feasible, isn't economically viable. Eschbach's team dreams up low-cost methods that require no special paper, materials or machine modifications yet can uniquely identify and protect a single document.

The toner used in most copiers and laser printers today dates to 1938, when the particles in powder made from grinding up the lycopodium plant were found to have a good shape and size for printing. Now Xerox has found a way to create toner particles by growing them from nano-size particles to highly optimized sizes and shapes. The new toner is cheaper to produce and use and is more reliable. The particles are so fine and frictionless that a bottle of toner sloshes like a liquid.

But that's not the end of toner research. Vandebroek encourages her scientists and engineers to "dream with customers." One unfulfilled dream, she says, is to be able to print with white ink. "We have cyan, magenta, black and yellow, but you can't make white from that," she says. "We can create it. The question is, How do you bring it to market?"

In any case, Vandebroek says, customers have bigger pain points. Businesses print 4.5 trillion pages of paper annually and spend 10 percent to 15 percent of their revenue on document-intensive activities -- two to three times more than they spend on research and development. "And half the time, when I'm looking for a certain document, I might not find the latest version, or I might not find what I'm looking for at all," she says. "I have way too much paper lying around everywhere, and I can't organize it."