What does the GE Store mean to me?
If the GE Store is the beating heart of our company, then innovation is the lifeblood that animates it. Some of the greatest inventions in history have sprung from the unexpected recombination of ideas and technologies. Our entire Aviation business took off because one our Power engineers figured out how to build a groundbreaking gas compressor. Later, our Aviation business returned the favor and helped our Power and Oil & Gas businesses build revolutionary mobile power plants with jet engines at their core. Our X-ray systems, originally developed by Healthcare, can now inspect both human arteries and gas pipelines.
But the GE Store goes beyond technology transfer. By taking the best ideas and products from all our businesses, we can stack technologies and know-how like LEGO? blocks and quickly build new things that the world needs and reach unexpected breakthroughs. We can even borrow some blocks from our partners. The GE Store lets us grab an idea, an approach, a tool, a framework or a way of working - no matter where it comes from – apply it, and scale it to deliver better, faster outcomes for our customers. We use it to bring in the expertise of our partners in markets around the globe. In other words, the Store is an exponential formula for new growth. It’s kind of like capturing lightning in a bottle.
FastWorks is a great example of the GE Store’s essence. The program is already transforming GE and becoming the way we work. It enables us to move quickly, experiment in finding a better solution, and stay focused on the customer. For example, we share ideas with our customers before they’re perfect, make small bets, and test and validate along the way to scale. What gets rewarded? Speed, risk-taking, and learning from failures. What gets jettisoned? Complexity, bureaucracy, and anything that doesn’t bring value to our customers.
FastWorks is also a force in incubating new businesses like Vitruvian Networks, a life sciences business co-developed with Mayo Clinic. It helped us be more competitive in rural healthcare markets, where we co-created with our customers an Affordable Care Portfolio, including the Lullaby Suite to reduce infant mortality. It’s also helping to transform our Lighting business into Current, an energy management company developing intelligent applications for industrial customers.
With the GE Store, we are positioned with ideas, people, and capital to solve problems as they emerge, ready to tackle change before it disrupts. A competitive advantage in an ever-accelerating, ever changing world.
Read more in GE's Annual Report.
Partner, Investor, MB Alekso Namai.
7 年Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
President at LG Engineering, LLC
7 年Again Beth Comstock giving us Jeff Immelt version of the history of technology and innovation taking merits form the original inventors. The fact is that by the end of WW2, Curtiss Wright was the leader in aircraft piston engines, and the Germans have invented the gas turbines for their Messerschmidt fighters. The US government (and the Russian) stole the idea from the Germans to develop jet engines and assigned Boeing the task to develop the concept for civilian use. Curtiss Wright was put out of business in the aircraft manufacturing and Boeing took off. GE came late into the game to improve ideas used in the power generation gas turbines with their Speedtronic MS-5000 forcing Westinghouse out of business (later sold to Siemens) by using political influences and others non very ethical tactics. Same happened with the technology known as coal gasification which the Germans used to convert coal into liquid fuel based on the water shift. The Germans developed this technology and companies like Texaco and later GE took the concept . We can go on and on with the X-ray, ultrasound (Krautkramer) and other double use technologies which Comstock is trying to portrait as GE original inventor. That is not the case, they acquired it!
General Manager-GM PPC (CT-CMT-COMPL) at Geoplex Drillteq Limited
7 年Excellent Berth. Your articulation was superb. I admire you paragraph linking and the overall idea behind this message. Good job. Hope to meet you one day.
VP, North American Enterprise Sales | Intelligent Automation
7 年Relatively simple concept meets real world scale and capability with the breadth of a company like GE, keep the innovation train rolling.
Non Executive Chairman at AmeriSus
7 年So often talent, experience and ideas get locked up in different parts of a large company when there is no "store" or "library" from which to go find ideas that have unexpected applicability to real world issues. One person's concept, with a bit of tweaking, can become another's product of the year.