Raymond LeBoeuf takes his history very seriously. A history and political science major at Northwestern University, the chairman of PPG Industries has a knack for dates and a penchant for recalling events significant in shaping how his company does business.

Consider the time in the late 1980s when a customer, a large automaker that used PPG glass, wanted to improve its solar-controlled windshields.

A team of PPG researchers came up with a blue-tinted windshield, but the auto designers weren't sure it would fly since carmakers for decades had been using green-tinted windshields that customers had come to expect and prefer.

After PPG spent millions of dollars to develop the blue glass, the automaker chose a green one from a competitor, the former Libby-Owens-Ford Glass.

"We played catch-up later," said LeBoeuf, characterizing the incident as a costly lesson in listening closely to customers. "We might have studied car buyers and known they would accept green, and we could have phased in blue. We could have listened better to our customers. Twenty years later, that memory remains fresh." PPG's blue-tinted windshield wasn't put on the shelf forever, though.

It's currently being offered as a designer label accessory in some Mercedes-Benz models and by Chrysler in its limited-edition PT Dream Cruiser.

"But green is still the color of choice," LeBoeuf acknowledged yesterday morning in an address to members of the Pittsburgh Technology Council at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown.

LeBoeuf's remarks to the crowd, peppered with entrepreneurs from small technology companies, focused largely on how the giant glass, paint and chemical conglomerate manages its $300 million annual investment in research and development.

PPG employs about 800 researchers and scientists at three local R&D facilities in Monroeville, Harmarville and Allison Park.

The company is so committed to reaping rewards from its research, LeBoeuf said, that it has a newly revised goal to generate 35 percent of total sales from products introduced in the last four years. The company had $8 billion in sales last year.

Paying attention to customers' needs and desires is a big part of doing that, he said.

"We're killing projects much sooner than we used to ... to devote resources to things that will be successful," said LeBoeuf, who has been PPG's chairman and chief executive since 1997. Take the self-cleaning glass known as SunClean. "That was an easy market ?. No one likes to wash windows."

SunClean windows "self clean" through technology in the glass that breaks down organic dirt and provides a sheathing action when it rains that flushes the surface clean.

PPG didn't invent the nanotechnology behind the process but worked for six years at its glass technology center in Harmarville to develop it to the stage where it could be marketed commercially, LeBoeuf said.

SunClean windows, introduced in early 2002, are now available nationwide at Home Depot, Sears and Lowe's stores, and through window distributors nationwide.

One way PPG has successfully capitalized on its technology investment is through partnerships with other companies, LeBoeuf said.

For example, when PPG wanted to improve its eyeglass lenses "and didn't want to spend 10 to 15 years" developing new technology, it formed a joint venture with Essilor International of France. The resulting company, Transitions Optical, launched in 1990, now generates $300 million in sales annually "and is quite profitable," said LeBoeuf.

Another way it's leveraged R&D dollars is by tapping expertise outside its own research ranks.

PPG has recently "farmed out some special tasks" to scientists in the former Soviet Union and China who "are working for us at very affordable rates," said LeBoeuf.

He also delivered a word of advice to technology entrepreneurs who might be focusing too much on what's going on in their labs instead of how the product will eventually be received in the marketplace.

PPG doesn't "make technical breakthroughs just for the sake of breakthroughs ?. We need to make money ? and generate value for our shareholders."