We have robust information on education in the United States. Now we need an educational culture that values the data.

The business community has a long history of partnering with schools and advocating for better education policy to help all students succeed, and with good reason. To meet the demands of a 21^st-century knowledge economy, America needs the next generation to be its best and brightest. But today, half of incoming ninth graders in urban, high-poverty schools are already three years or more below grade level. Our country’s 15-year-olds rank 26th for math, 21st for science and 17th for reading among their global peers. We can’t reach that goal of student success for all without leveraging quality information to help every student excel.

The problem in education is no longer a lack of quality data. Over the past 10 years, every state in the country has built a strong infrastructure to collect information about how our students, teachers and schools are doing. The information is richer than ever — it goes beyond just test scores to include demographics, course-taking, early warning systems and more. Together, it can provide a clear picture of student performance.

The problem is that, in too many cases, the information isn’t yet being used to improve student achievement. It’s often simply collected just to check a compliance box and then put on a shelf, never to be consulted again. The data is not being employed to foster a culture of continuous improvement. This would be unthinkable in the business sector.

Business leaders interested in supporting student achievement have been committing time, energy and money for years to change policy and practice to support reform in schools and systems. But with all that investment, they would wonder why schools weren’t showing better results. Why are education outcomes for our children not improving?

Any CEO knows that in order to answer those questions, you need thorough, accurate information to home in on challenges and identify workable solutions. A decade ago, we had neither quality data nor an education culture that valued evidence, and there was little capacity in schools to use information to manage for results. We now have robust information in education, and we are just on the cusp of leveraging that data to help kids excel.

When used responsibly and effectively, data can transform classrooms into hubs of innovation and excitement for learning. Data helps teachers personalize learning for individual students to a degree never before possible, instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all model that only works for some students. It is clear that the current K-12 education system is not working, as more than 50 percent of students entering two-year colleges — and nearly 20 percent of those entering four-year universities — are placed in remedial classes. Half of all undergraduates pay for remedial courses to cover what they should have learned in high school, at a cost of nearly $7 billion annually. Teaching and learning can be greatly improved by using quality data on a regular basis to guide effective approaches in the classroom.

This type of personalized learning is critical to ensuring that students have the skills they need to be successful in the workforce of the future — about 40 percent of employers are already dissatisfied with high school graduates’ ability to read and understand complicated materials, think analytically and solve real-world problems — and to keep the US competitive. By 2020, U.S. companies will need to employ 123 million highly skilled workers. However, only 50 million workers will qualify. Children are not widgets, and they need the highest quality individual support to develop the skills to thrive as workers in the knowledge economy.

As business leaders know, data is critical to getting results. Students need the best information to understand their performance and shape their own education journey. Parents need it to know what actions to take to be the best champions for their child. Teachers need it to understand their students’ performance and help them grow. And school leaders and policymakers need it to see what’s working — or not — in schools and allocate resources to effective programs.

The business community can play a critical leadership role in helping the education sector create a culture that uses data in the service of student learning. Business leaders should:

• First, use their bully pulpit as community and national leaders to advocate for investments in data infrastructure and in the capacity to use the information created through these data systems to inform decisions in education.
• Second, work with their local school and district leaders to offer training, support and guidance on how to manage with data to see better results.

There’s so much the business community can do to demonstrate and demystify a culture that values information. The future of the American economy — and the American dream — depends on it.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

Aimee Guidera is President and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign.

Cindy Cisneros is Vice President of Education Programs at the Committee for Economic Development. Follow them at @DQCAimee and @CindyCisneros8

All views expressed are those of the authors.

The footage captured by drones used to be the stuff of stunt pilots or computer-generated effects: a bird’s-eye view of a scientist standing disconcertingly close to a lake of bubbling lava; an elevated view of an epic nighttime ski session featuring an athlete outfitted in a glowing suit; being eye to eye with a worker fixing an antenna hundreds of feet above the ground.

These images and more are at the center of this weekend’s second New York City Drone Film Festival, the world’s first event dedicated solely to the unique perspective offered by camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The event will present the best pilots cinematographers using their skills to shoot everything from commercials to feature films. They will be rubbing elbows with robot builders and engineers responsible for making the latest drones, which can hover with five pounds of camera equipment. In fact, the festival’s first prize is a high-tech, custom-made drone that can lift up to eight pounds. The drone was built by a team of engineers from GE Global Research led by John Lizzi, manager of the Robotics and Machine-to-Machine Systems. We caught up with him and the team on the eve of the event. Here’s the edited version of our conversation. You can also watch this video about the drone:

GE Reports: Tell us about your drone.

Drone Team: We built it from off-the-shelf components in close cooperation with the New York City Drone Film Festival. There are several major components to it — the flight controller, motors, frame, battery, radio control transmitter, video transmitter and sensors, to name a few. The frame of the drone is primarily carbon fiber, and uses tapped aluminum pieces to join the various carbon pieces together.

GER: You said the drone was made from off-the-shelf components. What frame and parts did you use?

DT: The frame is a Griffin GD-8 octocopter with a motor-to-motor diameter of 1,200 millimeters. We chose a drone platform with eight motors to increase our payload capacity. It allowed us to install a larger variety of sensors and camera devices. We also needed design flexibility since we will also use the machine as a research platform. So we used a high-capacity lithium polymer battery called a Venom 16000mAh to increase run time.

GER: Could anyone build the machine at home?
DT: The build process for a drone like this is not difficult for the average tinkerer with basic tools. You need hex wrenches, a soldering iron and so on. But it does require careful assembly and setup within the flight controller to be safe. It needs to be set up and coded for your particular drone application and specs like the vehicle’s weight and the number of motors.

We built two drones and each drone took approximately 40 hours to build. As I mentioned, we are keeping the other one for research. The components themselves are independent devices, usually from different vendors, and they all need to be physically installed and wired together via soldering and connectors.

GER: What are applications outside making movies?
DF: The opportunities in cinematography seem to be endless. Indeed, you will see some of the best examples at the festival. But GE is an industrial company that also makes software. We are interested in using robots to tackle the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs that our employees and customers must do. With UAV robots, we can inspect hard-to-reach places and machines that are high up, like an offshore oil rig or a wind turbine. We can increase the inspection rate of these expensive assets without downtime, and find issues and schedule repairs quicker and safer.

(Video credit: GE. Image credits: GE Global Research)

For most Olympic athletes, the biggest fear is not failing to win a gold medal but falling victim to a last-minute injury that destroys years of hard work and endless hours of practice. But doctors working with big data and cloud-based software are competing to make those heart-breaking injuries less likely.

The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, for example, will be using a cloud-based version of GE Healthcare’s Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS) as the official electronic medical records (EMR) keeper. Moving these records into the cloud eliminates the need to ship pallets of paper around the globe in order to monitor athletes’ health. The technology will be available at all medical posts throughout the games and at the central clinic in the Olympic Village where doctors can deliver more complex care.

“To win the Olympics you have to be the best in the world on a particular day, at a particular time, in your sport,” says Bill Moreau, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s managing director of sports medicine. “To achieve that is extremely difficult. But, can you imagine training for 20 years and showing up sick or hurt when it could have been prevented? Our goal with electronic medical records is helping to ensure that athletes can deliver their best performance at the right time.”

Top and above: The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro will be using a cloud-based GE software system as the official keeper of electronic medical records. Images credit: Getty Images

Team USA successfully used the technology at the London 2012 Olympic Games and at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. The system not only helped improve medical diagnostics for American athletes at those events, but also produced an impressive array of data that helped U.S. trainers develop strategies to improve sport performance.

Dr. Moreau says the number of surgeries on the U.S. Women’s National Wrestling Team dropped 60 percent annually, four years running, in part because of using the information and analytics gleaned from EMRs to influence training protocols. “That’s an amazing number,” Dr. Moreau says. “That is the difference between paper and pencil and the power of the ability to do analytics.”

Team USA’s experience impressed the International Olympic Committee so much that it will use a specially built EMR platform at the Rio Games to track records of everything from scans to medications to allergies. Available in English and Portuguese, the system will help healthcare staff in Brazil better help their athletes. “Adding access to an electronic medical record is key to our drive towards the prevention of injury,” says Richard Budgett, medical and scientific director for the IOC. “The EMR is going to be a cornerstone for our medical services.” In fact, the IOC calls using EMR at the Games part of its gold medal medical services.

The average Olympic or Paralympic athlete has between seven and nine healthcare providers involved in their care at any time, says Dr. Moreau. Now all that data is available in a central repository for the first time. Dr. Moreau says his team can instantly look up an athlete’s records on a smartphone, helping doctors be more effective on site.

The Maracana soccer stadium will be one of the Olympic venues this summer in Rio. Image credit: Getty Images

By drawing on the massive amounts of data, the system also helps the medical team develop new ways to improve the health and performance of all athletes by preventing injuries. Team USA tracks 1,000 data points on each athlete and runs retrospective and forward-looking analytics to spot trends and offer solutions. Using EMR, for example, doctors helped reduce incidence of anemia among women athletes. Using blood tests, doctors can track hemoglobin levels and other lab results and then watch how various nutritional approaches impact stores of hemoglobin in the body, says Dr. Moreau.

Dr. Moreau says the number of surgeries on the U.S. Women’s National Wrestling Team dropped 60 percent annually, four years running, in part because of the using information and analytics gleaned from EMRs to influence training protocols. Image credit: U.S. Olympic Committee

The technology can help prevent injuries, but it has also been vital for helping injured athletes. Dr. Moreau recalls an accident at the Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi when one athlete (who competed with a spinal cord injury) took a hard fall while skiing and fractured his hip and bruised his lungs to the point where he could barely breathe and could not speak. “By being able to access his health record on my smartphone, I was able to learn he had significant allergies that would influence his course of care as well as identify the amount of anti-coagulants he already had on board,” Dr. Moreau says. “Being able to access that information had a profound impact on his patient management.”

Next up, Dr. Moreau is helping engineers at GE bring the power of Predix—the company’s cloud computing platform—to the project. This could allow sports science teams around the world to collaborate by sharing data leading to an even better understanding of effective sports nutrition and injury prevention.

Dr. Moreau’s goal is to learn new ways to improve the health for Team USA athletes. Then, he wants to share that information with the world to help everyone stay healthy and more active.

That sounds like a gold medal idea.

We are just scratching the surface of virtual reality. From doctors to auto technicians to astronauts, here are some ways VR technology is helping to reimagine the future of work.

Over time, ideas change and innovation takes us to new, unexplored territories that unleash the kind of creativity that creates new dynamic businesses and reimagines old ones. Today, we are potentially on the cusp of such a change — driven by virtual reality (VR).

VR will not simply affect one particular industry or a scientific research need. They have the ability to touch every aspect of society — from prepping for surgery to traveling in space. The ideas and opportunities are endless, if we can focus on the core outcome and not be afraid to try new ideas and concepts.

Here are four ways that VR is transforming industries:

1. Reimagining the Body

VR will enable doctors to see the body in new ways, with technologies that can transform medical imaging into interactive 3D programs.

“VR gives a very immersive way of looking at all this data,” says Sandeep Gupta, manager of Biomedical Image Analysis at GE Global Research, which is working with some research hospitals on early-stage testing of VR technology to allow doctors to take a virtual tour of a patient’s brain.

The technology holds the potential to not only improve patient outcomes, but also cost. Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center found that VR simulations helped to reduce surgical planning time by 40 percent and increase surgical accuracy by 10 percent.

2. Empowering the Worker

On the factory floor or the oil field, VR can provide skilled laborers with the real-time information to improve their effectiveness and safety. Industrial wearables— smart gloves, helmets, glasses, watches — enable workers to communicate with machines via sensors connected through the Industrial Internet, allowing for higher level of efficiencies, productivity and even predictivity.

“I have witnessed first-hand how human error can mean the difference between not just profit and loss, but life and death, and there is potential for 4D to vastly improve almost every process — from training new employees to assembling the most advanced machinery,” says Andy Lowery, president of Daqri, a startup that has developed a smart helmet for industrial applications. The helmet, which Lowery dubs the “worker empowerer,” is equipped with a camera, sensors and a transparent visor that displays data superimposed over objects in the worker’s view.

Wearables powered by VR and the Industrial Internet are redefining the future of work.

3. Collaborating Across Space

It doesn’t get more remote than space, and that’s where the true potential of VR technology is being tested.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are experimenting with Microsoft’s HoloLens for mixed-reality interactions with ground control. Instead of having to rely upon voice commands from Houston, astronauts are now able to have an expert guide them through in real-time how to make a repair or perform a certain experiment in space which reduces the possibility of error. The device can also display animated holographic illustrations on top of the objects with which the crew is interacting, eliminating the risk that communication delays could complicate difficult operations deep in space.

“HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” says Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Given the remoteness and extreme nature of operations, space could be the final frontier for VR technology.

Off-the-Job Training

Given VR’s early success in the gaming industry, it’s no surprise that some of the biggest promise for the technology lies in worker training applications. By introducing VR into an apprenticeship program, an industrial company could digitally transporting new employees to their future work environment without the added expense of relocation or fear of failure.

Engineers at Bosch have developed a virtual reality training experience to train auto technicians how to repair gasoline direct-injection (GDI) engines. By using virtual reality to train technicians, Bosch is creating a cost-efficient training program that directly benefits their bottom line, as Bosch projects it will have a 56 percent market share in GDI technology by 2017.

“Training has been pretty much the same forever,” says Rob Darrow, manager of strategic projects for Bosch. What is the future of training and how do you get tools to engage people and talk to them?”

The power of VR is that it transports you to a place that you have never been to before — the future. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of how these technologies will impact industries and improve our lives. The future is bright.

(Top image: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly performing checkouts for NASA’s Project Sidekick, which makes use of Microsoft’s HoloLens device. Courtesy of NASA)

Grayson Brulte is the Co-Founder & President of Brulte & Company, an innovation advisory and consulting company that designs innovation and technology strategies for a global marketplace.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Solar power is a great source of renewable energy, but as with many things in life, timing is everything. The sun doesn’t shine on long winter nights when people turn on their lights. On the other hand, a sunny Sunday afternoon can produce an ample electricity surplus that’s difficult to store.

“That’s the grand challenge,” says Stephen Sanborn, senior engineer and principal investigator at GE Global Research (GRC). “We need to make renewable energy available to the grid when it is needed.”

Sanborn and his team decided to solve this problem by storing the heat generated by thermal solar power plants in carbon dioxide. These power plants concentrate solar rays with vast fields of mirrors and use the heat to generate steam that spins a turbine. The carbon dioxide effectively works like a battery that can quickly release energy during peak demand.

The irony, of course, is that CO2 is the prime contributor to climate change, and the reason the world is switching to renewable energy in the first place.

The work is part of a research partnership between the GRC and the U.S. Department of Energy. Sanborn says the solution could revolutionize the solar power industry and also make natural-gas power plants more efficient.

Top image: A solar thermal power concentrates heat from the sun to boil water and use the steam to generate electricity. Image credit: Getty Images Above: A life-size prototype of GE’s “sunrotor” on a shelf at GRC. The system will be able to generate up to 100 megawatts, Sanborn says. Image credit: GE Global Research

Here’s how it works. The design has two main parts. The first one collects heat energy from the sun and stores it in a liquid of molten salt. “This is the hot side of the solution,” Sanborn says. The other component uses surplus electricity from the grid to cool a pool of liquid CO2 so that it becomes dry ice.

During power generation, the salt releases the heat to expand the cold CO2 into a supercritical fluid, a state of matter where it no longer has specific liquid and gas phases. It allows engineers to make the system more efficient.

The supercritical fluid will flow into an innovative CO2 turbine called the sunrotor, which is based on a GE steam turbine design. Although the turbine can fit on an office shelf (see image above) it can generate as much as 100 megawatts of “fast electricity” per installed unit—enough to power 100,000 U.S. homes.

Sanborn believes that a large-scale deployment of the design would be able to store “significant amounts” of power —— and deliver it back to the grid when needed. “We’re not talking about three car batteries here,” he says. “The result is a high-efficiency, high-performance renewable energy system that will reduce the use of fossil fuels for power generation.”

He says the system could be easily connected to a solar power system or a typical gas turbine. The tanks and generators could fit on trailers. His goal is to bring the cost to $100 per kilowatt-hour, way down from the $250 it costs to produce the same amount in a gas-fired power plant. “It is so cheap because you are not making the energy, you are taking the energy from the sun or the turbine exhaust, storing it and transferring it,” says Sanborn.

The process is also highly efficient, Sanborn says, yielding as much as 68 percent of the stored energy back to the grid. The most efficient gas power plants yield 61 percent.

The team is now building a conceptual design, which Sanborn believes could take five to 10 years to get from concept to market.

GE is also looking at other commercial applications that could be made available sooner. One such utilizes the waste exhaust heat from a natural gas generator. Sanborn says the solution could make gas-fired power plants 25 to 50 percent more efficient. That, he says, would be a major environmental benefit, because it would significantly reduce the overall CO2 emissions per kW hour of electricity produced by gas-powered plants.

Sanborn’s included in his team turbine experts, thermal engineers who understand refrigeration, heat-transfer scientists, chemical engineers who know how CO2 behaves and energy-storage experts. “We call all this expertise we have at our fingertips the GE Store,” he says. “It would be very difficult for me to do everything that this research calls for without that deep expertise of people available at GE.”

Last fall, the National Geographic Channel launched a new television series called “Breakthrough,” focusing on scientific discovery. The series was developed by the channel and GE, and produced by Oscar winners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

But “Breakthrough” was not the company’s first brush with Hollywood. In 1954, it hired actor and future President Ronald Reagan to host a national TV show called “General Electric Theater.” Former first lady Nancy Reagan appeared in four episodes as an actress, and their “all-electric” home was the star of two more segments. The whole family, including Ronald Jr., then 31/2 years old, and Patricia, 9, greeted viewers during the Christmas Eve episode in 1961. Nancy Reagan died on Sunday. She was 94.

Top image: The whole family, including Ronald Jr., then 31/2 years old, and Patricia, 9, greeted viewers during the Christmas Eve episode in 1961. Above: Reagan and future first lady Nancy Reagan opened their “all-electric” house in Pacific Palisades, California, to TV cameras while it was still under construction. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Other stars on the show, which aired every Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS television and radio until 1962, included Fred Astaire, Lou Costello, James Dean, Joan Fontaine, Ernie Kovacs and others. By 1956 it was the third-most-popular show on American television, reaching over 25 million viewers every week.

Don Herbert, the creator and host of the iconic educational series “Mr. Wizard,” was Reagan’s “progress reporter,” gathering news on GE’s “contributions to progress through research, engineering and manufacturing skill,” according to a story published in The Monogram, a GE magazine.

Over eight seasons, Reagan and Herbert crisscrossed the country and visited more than 130 GE labs and factories. They reported on everything from jet engines — the technology was barely a decade old back then — to the future of electricity. Several broadcasts in 1956 even took place inside Reagan’s brand-new “all-electric” hilltop home in Pacific Palisades, California, as part of GE’s “Live Better — Electrically” marketing campaign. The Reagan residence served as the model home, “pointing the way to the electrical future.”

“It wouldn’t be same house without the lighting, which is so unique and beautiful … the real thrill comes with sundown when the lights come on,” future first lady Nancy Reagan told The Monogram.

Critics liked the show, too. The Boston Herald opined that “apparently the people at GE assume that we are not idiots and are interested in some intelligent facts about their company and its work. It won’t start a trend but we thank them anyway.”

“General Electric Theater” and Ronald Reagan signed off for the last time in 1962. “We have tried consistently to put on the very best stories available using the best actors and actresses, directors and producers we could find,” Reagan wrote in The Monogram. “We on the ‘Theater’ believe that year in and year out, we have had the highest-quality half hour on television.”

Reagan inside a GE factory in 1956. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Over eight seasons, Reagan and Herbert crisscrossed the country to visit more than 130 GE labs and factories. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

All living things — from animals and plants down to cells — carry inside them a clock set to the most basic cycle on Earth: night and day. Scientists believe that this clock, called circadian rhythm, dates to the very beginning of life on Earth, some 3.5 billion years ago. It helps us stay awake and active when the sun is out, and rest during the night so cells can carry out basic maintenance and the brain can record memories.

The invention of artificial light has brought a plethora of benefits and one drawback. We can get a lot more done, but we also sleep less. What’s more, we’ve messed with our internal clocks by adjusting for daylight saving time. No wonder scientists around the world have been looking for a fix.

One team of engineers at GE Lighting recently came up with an “intelligent” LED called CbyGE designed to help users wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night. “We’ve built an LED light that changes colors and helps the body conform better to its circadian rhythm,” says Carmen Pastore, marketing leader for GE Lighting.

A chandelier made from CbyGE LED light bulbs. The LED change colors according to circadian rhythms and help users fall asleep and wake up. Image credit: GE Lighting

GE scientists invented the first visible LED in the 1960s and modern LED technology gave the team access to an “infinite palette” of colors. But it focused on two: blue and yellow. That’s because those colors stimulate receptors in the eye’s retina that control the level of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin in the body.

Yellow and orange hues, which humans got used to by watching millions of sunsets before going to sleep, stimulate melatonin production, while bright blue morning light tells the body to reduce the hormone’s level and get ready for a day’s work. “This is 3 billion years of evolution we are dealing with,” Pastore says. “Our LED is helping the body adjust, rather than waiting for the body to catch up to technological progress.”

Pastore says that effect of light is especially strong at night. “You can feel the hard punch of the blue light when you turn on your tablet in the middle of the night,” says Pastore. “Good luck falling asleep again. But a nice yellow glow will help you change a diaper and you and your toddler will go straight back to sleep.”

Pastore says the new LED contains a chip that could change its color from banana yellow to blueberry blue. But there is no need for such extremes. Instead, his team designed the light to fall within a range of subtle hues that can do the trick without being disruptive. Customers can control the light with an app from their smartphones and tablets over Bluetooth.

Says Pastore: “It sounds high-tech, but we are really getting back to nature.” The LED goes on sale today, just in time for the time change this weekend.

The custom mattress designer Helix Sleep installed the LEDs in its Manhattan showroom. GIF credit: GE Lighting.

Amid global economic uncertainty, here are three levers for topline growth.

Not a day goes by without news about a slowdown in the world economy. Yet paradoxically, a recent Pricewaterhouse survey revealed that while 70 percent of global executives said it is more difficult to find profitable growth opportunities now than 10 years ago, 74 percent also said there are more profitable growth opportunities now a decade ago.

In other words, people on the frontlines of the world economy – executives in leading companies – know opportunities exist, but can’t see them. Growth is like a needle in a haystack.

Fortunately, amid the fog are three clear opportunities, opened by what is called the 4^th Industrial Revolution and what I call Globalization 4.0:

1. Embrace the digital revolution.

Digitization is revolutionizing the economics of global production and trade. Digitization unlocks for companies new efficiencies, markets and innovations — without necessarily upsetting companies’ core business. Often, it makes it better:

• GE saves as much as 75 percent in manufacturing costs by shifting to 3D print fuel nozzles.
• UPS, using algorithms to route its trucks to avoid left turns, saves 3 million gallons of fuel per year.
• Adobe ‎gained over 6 million subscribers in only 4 years shifting to a subscription-based Cloud service, and now and makes over 60 percent of its revenue from it.

These efficiency gains are far from fully harnessed even in advanced economies, with McKinsey finding that the U.S. economy is only realizing 18 percent of its digital potential. Some of the largest sectors — healthcare, construction, manufacturing — face the biggest gaps.

We found that U.S. middle market companies are only marginally satisfied with their own digitization practices, in a new study sponsored by Magento and co-authored by Nextrade Group and the National Center for the Middle Market. These companies — a key engine of economic growth and job creation, with $10 million to $1 billion in revenue — gave themselves a “Digital Grade Point Average” of 2.8 on a scale of 0-4. That’s the equivalent of a C+.

In Europe, while almost all companies have broadband Internet access, according to the World Bank, only 19 percent use the Cloud, 15 percent have online sales, and 4 percent use RFID technology.

These low numbers imply tremendous opportunity: the coming embrace of digitization is poised to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in efficiency gains.

2. Go Mobile with Emerging Market Millennials

The second growth lever is mobile — specifically, the nexus of mobiles, Millennials and emerging markets.

Today, 98 percent of people in advanced economies own a mobile phone, as do 80 percent in the developing world, according to World Bank. However, just 31 percent of people in developing countries use their mobile phones to get online, versus 80 percent in advanced economies.

This is changing, with the number of smartphone users expected to more than double by 2020 to 6.1 billion. Thanks to phone upgrades and cheapening 4G subscriptions, most smartphone users will hold the Internet in their hand — before they ever have used a PC. Mobile-wielding netizens globalize globalization. Sales channels leading straight to the shopper’s handheld mean that companies can sell to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Meanwhile, 85 percent of world’s workforce will be Millennials by 2025. Socialized by B2C social media, ecommerce and the sharing economy into mobile purchases, Millennials will also make B2B searches online. Already, Millennials account for nearly half of all B2B purchases, and 42 percent of searches for B2B purchases come from mobile phones — a three-fold increase from 2012.

As smartphones proliferate, B2B companies have great opportunities to translate Millennials in new markets into sales.

3. Drive for Better Policy

The Internet may seem ubiquitous, but we are still in the early days of achieving its full potential — something that savvy public policy and public-private partnerships can help unlock.

One area is digital protectionism — countries censoring websites, blocking the flow of cross-border data flows or mandating that foreign companies set up servers in-country for market access. These policies cost up to 2 percent of national GDP– for the country imposing the restrictions.

Narrowing digital divides would also spur growth. Only 46 percent of people globally use the Internet, and most of them are in advanced economies. Emerging markets still significantly trail advanced economies in Internet connectivity and technologies riding on the Web — as do rural areas behind urban centers, the old behind the young and women behind men.

‎Bridging certain “digital disconnects” could yield giant gains:

• Harmonizing mobile spectrum in Asia could save the region $1 trillion each year.
• Making the many national online payment platforms interoperable would boost cross-border online sales by billions.
• Establishing regional Internet exchange points in Latin America would save the region 33 percent in cross-border data transit costs.

The long-term growth of companies and countries alike is largely determined not only by the amount of labor and capital, but also total factor productivity (TFP) — magic pixie dust that includes human capital, technology, good institutions, rule of law and other such hard-to-measure variables. At some point, labor and capital hit diminishing returns. Indeed, today’s concerns about secular stagnation owe partly to the fact that capital investments have run their course in China and other emerging markets.

‎TFP, meanwhile, is limitless. With determination and imagination, executives can take advantage of new technologies and better policies to draw out more TFP — and keep expanding topline growth. Global growth will follow.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Kati Suominen is the Founder and CEO of Nextrade Group, LLC and TradeUp Capital Fund. She is also Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Adjunct Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is authoring her 10th book, Globalization 4.0: How Disruptive Technologies Reshape Business and Policy in the Hyperconnected World.

All views expressed are those of the author.

New solar and wind energy farms added a whopping 68 percent of new power generation capacity in the United States last year, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. When combined with hydropower, renewables now make up a fifth of America’s electricity generation capacity, more than double what it was in 2008.

This trend isn’t going away. Getting all that clean electricity to homes and factories, however, is a challenging task. Although there are new power lines sprouting all over the country, the electricity they carry can sometimes clash with existing infrastructure. “There are some unintended consequences,” says Robert D’Acquila, senior technical director with GE’s Energy Consulting Group.

Take the case of a power plant operated by Newmont Mining near Elco, Nevada. The plant is using a steam turbine to generate electricity for the local grid.

When the utility that operates the local grid, NV Energy, decided to revamp their existing grid to accommodate more renewables, Newmont invited D’Acquila’s team to check out the impact the changes to the grid would have on its steam turbine. “We ran it through our software and realized that the power plant faced a big challenge,” D’Acquila says. “The technology the new grid used to carry electricity over long distances would create power disturbances that could damage Newmont’s turbine.”

Grid illustration. Images credit: Getty Images

Here’s how. As the name implies, alternating current (AC) oscillates as it travels through the wire. When the frequency of the current gets out of synch with the tiny vibrations of the steam turbine, they can add up and cause so-called sub-synchronous resonance that could break the shaft of the machine. “When you drive a car on a road with grooved surface, your dashboard or your windows sometime start to vibrate,” D’Acquila says. “The rattling is the sound of resonance and the power plant would experience a similar thing.”

D’Acquila and his team were able to spot the danger because they were using big data modeling software from GE with access to grid information pooled from all over the U.S. They used the results to design a power filter that keeps out the dangerous frequencies. They also added a special “last resort” mechanical brake that can “trip” the power plant and disconnect it from the grid.

A high-voltage tower. Image credit: Getty Images

The team installed the solution in 2014 and the power plant has been humming along ever since. But more work is coming. The U.S. has agreed to reduce its CO2 emissions so high-voltage power lines that carry renewables are sprouting up all over the country. For example, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, which operates and manages the electric grid over three quarters of the state, is adding hundreds of miles of new power lines to bring renewable electricity to customers. “The new grid integrates renewables, gas, coal, nuclear and other sources of the electricity,” D’Acquila says. “The mix is changing and we have to make sure that our infrastructure can accommodate that.”

Solar power is a great source of renewable energy, but as with many things in life, timing is everything. The sun doesn’t shine on long winter nights when people turn on their lights. On the other hand, a sunny Sunday afternoon can produce an ample electricity surplus that’s difficult to store.

“That’s the grand challenge,” says Stephen Sanborn, senior engineer and principal investigator at GE Global Research (GRC). “We need to make renewable energy available to the grid when it is needed.”

Sanborn and his team decided to solve this problem by storing some of the heat generated by thermal solar power plants in carbon dioxide. These power plants concentrate solar rays with vast fields of mirrors and use the heat to generate steam that spins a turbine. The carbon dioxide effectively works like a battery that can quickly release energy during peak demand.

The irony, of course, is that CO2 is the prime contributor to climate change, and the reason the world is switching to renewable energy in the first place.

The work is part of a research partnership between the GRC and the U.S. Department of Energy. Sanborn says the solution could revolutionize the solar power industry and also make natural-gas power plants more efficient.

Top image: A solar thermal power concentrates heat from the sun to boil water and use the steam to generate electricity. Image credit: Getty Images Above: A life-size prototype of GE’s “sunrotor” on a shelf at GRC. This 10 megawatt prototype is the basis for the full-scale system which stores 100 megawatt-hours and generates power at 33 megawatt, Sanborn says. Image credit: GE Global Research

Here’s how it works. The design has two main parts. The first one collects heat energy from the sun and stores it in a liquid of molten salt. “This is the hot side of the solution,” Sanborn says. The other component uses surplus electricity from the grid to cool a pool of liquid CO2 so that it becomes dry ice.

During power generation, the salt releases the heat to expand the cold CO2 into a supercritical fluid, a state of matter where it no longer has specific liquid and gas phases. It allows engineers to make the system more efficient.

The supercritical fluid will flow into an innovative CO2 turbine called the sunrotor, which is based on a GE steam turbine design. Although the turbine can fit on an office shelf (see image above) it can generate as much as 100 megawatts of “fast electricity” per installed unit—enough to power 100,000 U.S. homes.

Sanborn believes that a large-scale deployment of the design would be able to store “significant amounts” of power —— and deliver it back to the grid when needed. “We’re not talking about three car batteries here,” he says. “The result is a high-efficiency, high-performance renewable energy system that will reduce the use of fossil fuels for power generation.”

He says the system could be easily connected to a solar power system or a typical gas turbine. The tanks and generators could fit on trailers. His goal is to bring the cost to $100 per megawatt-hour, way down from the $250 it costs to produce the same amount in a gas-fired power plant. “It is so cheap because you are not making the energy, you are taking the energy from the sun or the turbine exhaust, storing it and transferring it,” says Sanborn.

The process is also highly efficient, Sanborn says, yielding as much as 68 percent of the stored energy back to the grid. The most efficient gas power plants yield 61 percent.

The team is now building a conceptual design, which Sanborn believes could take five to 10 years to get from concept to market.

GE is also looking at other commercial applications that could be made available sooner. One such utilizes the waste exhaust heat from a natural gas generator. Sanborn says the solution could make gas-fired power plants 25 to 50 percent more efficient. That, he says, would be a major environmental benefit, because it would significantly reduce the overall CO2 emissions per kW hour of electricity produced by gas-powered plants.

Sanborn’s included in his team turbine experts, thermal engineers who understand refrigeration, heat-transfer scientists, chemical engineers who know how CO2 behaves and energy-storage experts. “We call all this expertise we have at our fingertips the GE Store,” he says. “It would be very difficult for me to do everything that this research calls for without that deep expertise of people available at GE.”

This week brought a plethora of news from the bleeding edge of research. Monkeys learned to drive wheelchairs with their thoughts, scientists used stem cells to regenerate the lens of the eye and restore vision, doctors found a way to do kidney transplants with kidneys from any donor and avoid organ rejection, and a Google AI system beat a human champion at Go, the most complex game ever invented.

Monkeys Drive Wheelchairs With Their Thoughts

Top image and above: (A) The mobile robotic wheelchair, which seats a monkey, was moved from one of the three starting locations (dashed circles) to a grape dispenser. The wireless recording system records the spiking activities from the monkey’s head stage, and sends the activities to the wireless receiver to decode the wheelchair movement. (B) Schematic of the brain regions from which we recorded units tuned to either velocity or steering. Red dots correspond to units in M1, blue from PMd and green from the somatosensory cortex. (C) Three video frames show Monkey K drive toward the grape dispenser. The right panel shows the average driving trajectories (dark blue) from the three different starting locations (green circle) to the grape dispenser (red circle). The light blue ellipses are the standard deviation of the trajectories. Images and description credits: Duke University

Neuroscientists at Duke University have built a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows monkeys to steer a robotic wheelchair with their thoughts. “The BMI uses signals from hundreds of neurons recorded simultaneously in two regions of the monkeys’ brains that are involved in movement and sensation,” according to the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence newsletter. “As the animals think about moving toward their goal — in this case, a bowl containing fresh grapes — computers translate their brain activity into real-time operation of the wheelchair.”

In a separate effort, scientists at GE Global Research are building tiny brain implants, which could one day improve the lives of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Stem Cells Restore Vision After Cataract Surgery by Regrowing Human Lenses

After removing a cataract, scientists used stem cells to regrow the lens. Image credit: Getty Images

Working halfway around the world, scientists at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Medicine and Shiley Eye Institute, along with colleagues in China, have used stem cells to regenerate “functional” lenses and restore vision in infants after cataract surgery. “An ultimate goal of stem cell research is to turn on the regenerative potential of one’s own stem cells for tissue and organ repair and disease therapy,” said Kang Zhang, chief of ophthalmic genetics at the school.

How Origami Can Improve Surgery

A pair of engineering professors at Brigham Young University and their students used origami techniques to shrink surgical devices. The idea is to make incisions to accommodate the instruments that are so small they can heal on their own without stitches. “The whole concept is to make smaller and smaller incisions,” said professor Larry Howell. “To that end, we’re creating devices that can be inserted into a tiny incision and then deployed inside the body to carry out a specific surgical function.”

Google’s DeepMind AI System Beats Human Champion at Go

Stones on a Go board. Image credit: Getty Images

AlphaGo, an AI system built on Google’s DeepMind platform, won the first game of Go against one of the best human players of the game — often described as the most complex gave ever invented. “I’m in shock,” the player, Lee Se-dol, reportedly said at a press conference after the match. The winner of the best-of-five series will take home a $1 million prize.

New Process Allows Kidney Transplants From Any Donor

This image of the kidneys was captured by GE’s Revolution CT scanner. Image credit: GE Healthcare

A study that involved 22 medical institutions and more than 1,000 patients has successfully tested a procedure that allows doctors to tweak a patient’s immune system and transplant kidneys from any donor. Called desensitization, the process first filters out antibodies from the patient’s blood to prevent rejection. When the body replenishes its own antibodies, they do not attack the new kidney. There are more than 100,000 patients in the U.S. waiting for a kidney transplant. The procedure could dramatically reduce the number of people on the waiting list. “Desensitization is still not for every transplant center,” senior author Dr. Dorry Segev, of Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press. But the findings show “you don’t need a compatible living donor to make a transplant happen today — you just need a living donor.” The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Asking the right question — and expanding the circle of collaboration — can often lead to real innovation.

Think how the 20^th century would have been different if Thomas Edison had set out to brighten dimly lit homes and illuminate industry by improving a valve on a gas lighting fixture. The conventional solutions of the time for brighter, better and safer lighting were in a “bubble” of information, technology and expertise all centered on the delivery of gas.

Real innovation — like the advances from Edison and his team — is not about assembling solutions from the tools and ideas we have, but from the questions and needs outside our limited sphere of knowledge.

Moving “outside the bubble” toward real innovation requires fundamental changes in traditional problem-solution thinking. The first challenge is to make sure we’re asking the right questions about what is the real problem or opportunity. The second principle demands that, in collecting information and ideas, we enlarge the circle of ideas, resources and experiences.

Defining the Real Problem Before Building a Solution

A refrigerator is designed to keep food cold, right? But ask anyone why they put leftovers in the fridge, and they’ll tell you it’s to keep food from spoiling. So the real problem we’re solving is freshness — not coolness.

We often approach product and technology design the same way. We rush to a solution without understanding the core problem we’re addressing.

At GE, for example, our customers create computing and communications technology that requires more and more processing horsepower in smaller, denser server cabinets, communications devices or on printed circuit boards. So the solution the industry looks for is a smaller power conversion unit.

But is the right question, “How can we make power units smaller?” We can — and do — make them smaller. But what if the question was, “Can you give us back the precious space we need for higher processing capacity?”

That question — a better definition of the problem — shifted our thinking to what we now call Designing in the Negative Space. We can’t entirely eliminate power conversion units — the devices still need power — but we can locate the power in previously unusable space or consolidate other power-related components into our units.

By understanding the need and reframing the question, we found solutions “outside the bubble.”

Collaboration Outside the Bubble

Our second principle is enlarging the circle of collaboration. As we work to truly innovate, collaboration with others outside our normal “bubble of expertise” creates new perspectives, invites different questions and opens channels to new experts and resources.

Amazon is a great example of a company that reached outside its core expertise to exponentially expand its product and service offerings — along with its value and brand — outside the normal sphere to become a “get any product, service and digital content you need anytime, anyplace” company. If Amazon had limited its expertise to e-commerce, it could have quickly become obsolete.

“OK,” you might say, “but we’re in the widget business and are happy staying in that space.” Or maybe you’re in the same camp as GE’s Embedded Power group, which provides board-level AC-to-DC and DC-to-DC power conversion solutions. With deep domain expertise and a reputation for innovation, why should we look outside the bubble? Yet, we too need to constantly look outside, because the next problem we can solve — the next value we can create — might be waiting for us.

Looking outside — literally — picture the local weather forecaster. You tune into the local news every morning to find out if you need to bring an umbrella to work.

That same weather information might just give us a new vantage on how we design our next generation of power conversion and mission-critical power products. Since many of our systems manage critical or peak demand conditions, they must provide power at maximum specification most — or all — of the time. But there can be a tradeoff in energy efficiency.

Imagine if power systems collected data from external sources, such as weather predictions or peak social media activity during the Super Bowl, to anticipate load demand. That system could provide an optimum level of both protection and energy efficiency — a smart power system that knows when to leave the umbrella at home.

So how do we tap this expertise outside our bubble?

• Use digital tools such as social collaboration and crowdsourcing to expand domain expertise. What we used to do at trade shows, we can now do on social networking — sharing ideas, asking questions and finding a broader vantage.

• Look for adjacent technologies that might find their way into your domain expertise. We’re in the electronics design space, but we can be inspired to innovate by looking at related technologies in materials design or predictive analytics. That’s the principal behind the GE Store, a global exchange of tools, technology and knowledge that combine, reconfigure and imagine new solutions to create better outcomes for customers.

This new thinking requires a new set of rules and imperatives. It means collaborating on ideas, not just collecting information. And it demands that we share questions, ideas and information in new ways beyond the comfort of our bubble. In the meantime, don’t forget your umbrella.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

For another article by Dr. Wassef on Innovation in GE Reports click here.

Dr. Karim Wassef is General Manager of Embedded Power for GE’s Critical Power business, GE’s Critical Power business, part of Energy Connections. To learn more visit www.gecriticalpower.com

All brand names mentioned in this article are the registered trademarks of their respective companies. All views expressed are those of the author.

When the large Pakistani textile maker Sapphire Group wanted to secure a reliable supply of electricity for its mills recently, it didn’t just build a new power plant. The company used a technology called digital twin to model the entire plant inside the cloud, run simulations and come up with the optimal way to design and run it.

In Ireland, the operators of the Whitegate Power Station, near Cork, placed more than 140 sensors throughout the plant. They digitize vibrations, temperature and other data, and feed it into the cloud for analysis. The results help the plant managers monitor and optimize operations in real time. The idea is to improve efficiency and minimize downtime at the 445-megawatt plant, which supplies up to 10 percent of Ireland’s households with electricity.

On the French Riviera, near Nice, another piece of software managing a smart grid is helping a municipality juggle different energy sources and pick the most efficient one.

The digital glue that connects these technologies is Predix, the cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet developed by GE. “We’ve pulled together all of our software offerings, sensors and domain-specific applications for the power and electricity industry,” says Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer for GE Power, who also runs GE Power’s new Digital Solutions business. “From now on, we’ll be just another GE Power business like nuclear, gas power systems and steam.”

GE has spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix. The platform has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make machines run better. The platform is now open to all developers.

“People are starting to realize that digital technologies are the most potent tool for driving value and efficiency in the energy industry,” Bell says. “We can use it to maximize total plant and grid performance and create new business models that reach all the way to consumers. Imagine if your utility was your best friend, using software to provide reliable electricity, drive decarbonization and even help you participate in the energy market by allowing you to sell back into the grid the electricity you make with the solar panels on your roof. This is happening now.”

The opportunities are huge. For starters, the world needs to add a lot of power — as much as 50 percent of existing capacity over the next two decades. Experts estimate that 1.3 billion people still live without access to a reliable supply of electricity.

To fix that, countries will need not only turbines and generators, but also software to get the most out of the machines. A study released by the World Economic Forum in January estimated that optimizing how electricity gets delivered over the grid from power plants to customers could save between $440 billion to $1.2 trillion, while lowering peak demand, reducing emissions and creating new jobs.

Right now, Bell says, GE is the only company that knows how to make both the machines that make electricity and the software that runs them. “We understand the industrial and the digital side,” he says. “The utilities that embrace digital will redefine the industry. They will be the leaders.”

Africa faces a “bold revolution,” in which some of our biggest challenges can become unique opportunities.

As global leaders met at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the focus was on how the Fourth Industrial Revolution can deliver jobs and economic prosperity for all people across the world.

For the African continent, being part of this new economic revolution may seem full of challenges, yet it is also full of promise. After decades of overreliance on volatile commodities cycles, unprecedented efforts of structural transformation are currently being implemented across numerous African economies.

Over the past decade, African leaders have shown an indefatigable commitment to maintaining a stable macroeconomic framework and to setting up a business environment that is favourable to foreign investment and infrastructure upgrades. With all these changes, I am convinced that our continent will rise to the challenge of moving away from our resource-driven economies towards diversified and productivity-driven economies. In turn, the new phase of African economic development will itself influence a rise of a new generation of African entrepreneurs who are tech-savvy and able to influence global technological developments.

The debate in Davos focused on this “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” a challenge I define as creating a “bold revolution” — when some of our biggest challenges can become unique opportunities.

For our part, Africa will make a significant contribution to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Governments across the continent have laid down their vision in the report on The Future We Want for Africa by 2063, adopted by the African Union Heads of States and Government. This vision has already been translated into action.

In my country, Gabon, entry into the digital age, which is the future, can be seen in numerous sectors — from telecommunications to security, finance and hospitality. Recent developments include the launch of the e-visa, electronic tax filing and payment systems, mobile banking, and satellite-assisted environmental monitoring (SEAS Gabon) to track environmental threats. The contribution of these new activities to economic growth is already being seen.

Gabon’s GRAINE scheme, for example, is a pioneering plantation programme aimed at creating a balanced agriculture economy, which will allow farmers to produce for themselves without the need for infrastructure. Farmers will be able to use digital media to trade their products at the international level– making money in a way suitable with their environment and living conditions.

My government has taken significant measures to enable the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in our country. To this end, we launched the National Agency for Digital Infrastructure and Frequencies (ANINF) in 2011. The agency aims to improve the nation’s information system strategy and enable the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs.

In 2015, Gabon was awarded the ICT in Sustainable Development Award for improved access to information and communication technology network and services, reducing cost, and for having expanded Internet access to young people as well as the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Working together, we must do more. This is why I have travelled to Switzerland to drum up support for investment and jobs for Gabon. We are convinced that today’s technological revolution can help leverage existing global knowledge towards strengthening the continent’s own technology efforts, its know-how, and innovation capabilities. Put simply, this change will bring about the opportunity to make better, faster, and more cost-effective decisions for everyone in Africa, therefore increasing profitability and welfare.

Conversely, the size and increasing sophistication of our markets mean that Africa will be a place where businesses and technologies can prosper, and that the continent can power its way through this technological revolution.

Several key opportunities are within reach in a variety of sectors, including agriculture and food security, environment and natural resources security, and health. These opportunities will materialize as levels of domestic and foreign investment grow higher.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is set to help us achieve our goal: become an emerging country by 2025. Surely it is a challenge, but we can deliver together. This is neither a slogan nor a fad, but the route that leads away from weak and erratic economic growth to a more prosperous future for all of Africa.

(Top image: Courtesy of Trevor Samson/World Bank)

This piece first appeared in the World Economic Forum blog.

Ali Bongo Ondimba is President of Gabon. 

All views expressed are those of the author.

The Concorde was the first and last supersonic jet in passenger service. But that claim comes with a caveat.

The plane could accelerate above the speed of sound only over the ocean. The prospect of noisy sonic booms caused by the plane crossing the sound barrier forced pilots to hold back the throttle above towns and cities after takeoff and before touchdown. “This speed limit actually made the plane much less efficient,” says Karl Wisniewski, director of advanced programs at GE Aviation. “It was designed to fly fast.”

The last Concorde landed in 2003, but NASA and a team of aerospace companies that includes Lockheed Martin and GE Aviation are not finished with supersonic passenger flight. They are developing a supersonic concept plane that could quietly break the sound barrier without setting off a sonic boom and rattling everyone on the ground.

The loud noise is the sound of shockwaves set off by an object traveling through air faster than the speed of sound. “We want to know whether there is a level of sonic boom that’s not bothersome to the population,” says Wisniewski. “We are looking for design features that would minimize the perceived noise on the ground.”

Last month NASA said it would pay Lockheed about $20 million over the next 17 months to complete a preliminary design for Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST). The first flight of a scaled-down version of the “low boom” plane could take place in 2019. Tests over populated areas could come in the next decade, depending on results and funding.

Airbus and Boeing are also looking at new supersonic designs.

NASA said in its news release, “Almost 70 years since Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 as part of our predecessor agency’s high speed research … we’re continuing that supersonic X-plane legacy with this preliminary design award for a quieter supersonic jet with an aim toward passenger flight.”

Top: NASA’s concept of a next-generation supersonic plane. Image credit: NASA Above: A GE-powered F/A-18 fighter Jet is breaking through the sound barrier. Image credit: Getty Images

The Lockheed prototype will use GE’s F404 jet engine, which the company developed for the F/A-18 Hornet fighter planes with top speed of Mach 1.8, or 1.8 times the speed of sound. “We are using an existing supersonic engine for the prototype because we want to keep the costs down as low as possible,” Wisniewski says. “We are helping to integrate the engine with the aircraft.”

GE is supplying the QueSST team with “cycle deck,” software that simulates how the engine operates. “It helps us calculate the thrust and fuel consumption anywhere on the flight map,” Wisniewski says.

In 1947, the Bell X-1B rocket plane piloted by Chuck Yeager accelerated to 700 mph, or 1.06 Mach, and became the first aircraft to cross the sound barrier. The plane, which was powered by a rocket engine, was drop-launched from Superfortress bombers. Image credit: NASA

Along with NASA, GE Aviation is one of the cradles of supersonic flight. In 1948, the company hired German aviation pioneer Gerhard Neumann, who invented the variable stator. The revolutionary design allowed pilots to turn the vanes on the engine’s stator, change the pressure inside the turbine and make planes routinely fly faster than the speed of sound.

Gerhard Neumann (left) and Neil Burgess developed the J79 engine, GE’s first supersonic jet engine that could travel as fast as twice the speed of sound. Image credit: GE Aviation

In the 1960s, the company even built the GE4 supersonic engine for the Boeing 2707 plane, America’s supersonic answer to the Concorde made by Britain and France and Russia’s Tu-144. But the Boeing project was canceled due to rising costs and the lack of potential customers.

Russia’s Tupolev Tu-144. Image credit: Getty Images

The last Concorde is now part of the permanent exhibition at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York City: Image credit: Shutterstock

GE makes several supersonic military engines today. Its latest design — the world’s first and only adaptive-cycle, three-stream engine —combines high fuel efficiency for subsonic flight with high thrust for supersonic performance.

GE’s ADVENT adaptive-cycle jet engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

Metal-cutting technology hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 60 years. Operators still clamp metal parts to the support bench and use drill bits or some other tools to achieve the desired shape. But a new breed of super-strong super-alloys is fighting back.

The intense heat generated during the machining of these next-generation materials can deform, chip and break ordinary cutters. “It is like slicing butter with butter,” says Michael Petracci, president of GE Ventures Licensing. “You won’t get very far.”

As a result, parts from the most advanced metals are taking longer to make and getting more expensive. Since GE uses them inside jet engines, gas turbines and other machines, “we needed a better tool for the job,” Petracci says. “Since there was nothing on the market, we invented one.”

Top and above: Compressor blisks for the CF34 jet engine made from a single piece of metal. Image credit: GE Global Research

Cue the Blue Arc, the superfast machine that can slice through an aerospace-grade titanium alloy in just three minutes — the job normally takes 45. GE estimates that it could save $200 million over five years using the technology.

The company first introduced it in 2011. Since then, a number of customers and GE businesses have taken it for a spin. They used it to make parts from Inconel, a tough alloy used in jet engines, and titanium, which softens at 1,649 degrees Celsius. “When people see this technology in action, they are amazed,” Petracci says.

Blue Arc uses a high-speed beam of electrons to erode and remove metal. The design eliminates the need for high-powered spindles, expensive cutters and other devices. “Cutting tools have been around since the Stone Age and hard tungsten carbide tools, which have been around since the 1950s, have been their latest iteration until Blue Arc came along,” Petracci says.

Blue Arc at work. The machine has a smaller footprint on the factory floor, wastes less material and releases less dust and contaminants in the air, Petracci says.Image credit: GE Global Research

Blue Arc can work for an entire shift without a bit change. Since it doesn’t deform or break, it can cut machine-tool capital costs by 30 percent and the cost of cutter tools by 70 percent.

The list of advantages goes on. Compared to traditional tools, Blue Arc machining reduces the stress on aerospace blisks, compressor blades and other components. The machine also has a smaller footprint on the factory floor, wastes less material and generates less dust and contaminants in the air, Petracci says.

He says the technique is especially useful now, when engineers prefer to machine large parts from a single piece of metal, which allows them to retain the strength of the metal while minimizing the weight of the completed part. “We had to figure out new ways to cut super-alloys into unique geometries more efficiently,” Petracci says.

GE invented and refined the technology, drawing on scientists at its Global Research Center and expertise from GE businesses including Aviation, Power and Oil & Gas. GE partnered with Mitsui Seiki, a Japanese manufacturing-machine maker, to produce the prototype Blue Arc machine. It is now seeking licensing partners to learn how they would use it. Interested companies can test it at GRC’s Detroit campus.

Petracci says using Blue Arc won’t require a complete retooling of factories. Instead, cutting machines can be retrofitted to work with the new technology. “Blue Arc will take us into the modern era of machining,” he says.

Artist Stewart Kenneth Moore is best known for his surreal canvases, etchings and comic strips depicting everyone from James Joyce and Vaclav Havel to Macbeth caught in a nightmare of the everyday. But ever since he was a boy, Moore has been fascinated with pi, the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. It is a mathematical constant and an infinite number, but we generally round it to 3.14 — hence Pi Day on March 14. (The date also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.)

Squaring the circle. Moore assigned pigments to numbers from 0 to 9 and used them paint pi digits. Images credit: S.K. Moore

“I always wanted to paint math,” he said from his home in Prague today, on Pi Day 2016. “In school, I was scared and bored by it. I believed there must be a better way to teach mathematics. I decided to use colors to make it accessible.” Moore assigned pigments to the individual numbers and has painted pi to 2,500 decimal places. “I thought that maybe some pattern or harmony would emerge, just like Seurat’s pointillist paintings,” he said. “When you look up close, there are just dots of paint, but further out an order emerges in your mind and you see colors that aren’t really there.”

But the results have disappointed him. “I felt like I was like painting static on the TV set,” he said. “I realized the problem was with the approach. A color, just like a number, is just a value.” He is now thinking about blending pi in the formula he uses to mix his pigments. “Maybe I have to go deeper.”

Humans have known about pi since they started using wheels 4,000 years ago. Ancient Babylonians could celebrate an entire “Pi Month” since they rounded pi down to 3 (as did the Old Testament).

In 300 B.C., Euclid opened a path for calculating pi by looking at the circle as a polygon with infinitely many sides. Archimedes applied Euclid’s theorems to arrive at pi a few decades later. He also paid for pi with his life. When Roman soldiers occupying his hometown, Syracuse, walked over his math drawings in the sand, he told them to get lost. He never recovered from that mistake. His apocryphal last words? “Do not disturb my circles.”

Death of Archimedes by Giammaria Mazzuchelli. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The inventors of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, used pi to close the gap between algebra and geometry in the 1690s. They used infinite-series techniques to calculate pi to 15 digits.

Twentieth-century mathematicians like India’s Srinivasa Ramanujan used number theory and special mathematical tools called elliptic integrals to find new ways to compute pi even further.

We now know pi to 12 trillion digits, but the job can’t be finished. Although pi’s defined as the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle, it’s also an irrational number that, maddeningly, cannot be expressed as a fraction and runs into infinity. “These things have deep connections with other areas of mathematics,” the late GE mathematician Andrew Barnes told GE Reports. “They take us to the forefront of the greatest unsolved problems.”

Moore keeps thinking about deep connections between math and art. “Math is the language of the universe that we apes have somehow figured out,” he said. “There are numbers everywhere — in seashells, the branchings of rivers and trees, in the spiral pattern of sunflower seeds. I look at the night sky about which we know so much and still so little and I’m baffled.”

Like stars in many galaxies, sunflowers grow their seeds along spirals that reflect the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio. Images credit: Getty Images (galaxy) and Shutterstock

A pi painting in Moore’s studio. Image credit: S.K. Moore

The Industrial Internet is leading to the development of an industrial app economy that has the potential to have a bigger impact than consumer apps. Here’s how.

Thanks to disruptive technology, the world is changing more quickly than ever before. As a result, many industries — manufacturing, energy, healthcare, transportation — face an important mandate: identify as tech companies or become obsolete.

The Industrial Internet is a major part of this cultural transformation, bringing about a nascent industrial app economy that holds the potential to drive the 4th Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Internet will be the powerful enterprise counterpart to the consumer Internet of Things (IoT). It is transforming manufacturing — and the mindset firms need to succeed.

Welcome to Platformia

One major shift is from products to services. The number of wirelessly connected products in existence (excluding smartphones or computers) is projected to rise to 21 billion by 2020. The data output from these smart, interconnected products will be the foundation for new services that could be more profitable than the products themselves.

A second shift is the race to develop “platforms,” software foundations where applications can be built. One of the biggest challenges facing both the consumer IoT and the Industrial Internet is interoperability — smart objects will have to be programmed to synch on the same platform to communicate. Yet it’s likely that a handful of global behemoths will develop competing platforms that dominate this space — a world of Platformia— instead of one all-encompassing platform connecting every industrial and consumer object. This will merely be the next evolution of something we already see every day: competing smartphone and computing operating systems.

The Industrial App Revolution

The marketplace for consumer-oriented personal apps has exploded exponentially, and a similar app economy is now developing within the industrial app space. Systems, machines and products on the Industrial Internet will be guided increasingly by industrial apps. While consumers may not be aware of most industrial apps that operate “behind the curtain,” these apps could have an even greater impact on their lives.

Collectively, these apps will be one of the driving forces behind productivity and operational efficiency in the global economy of the near future. The global industrial app market should exceed $200 billion by 2019, according to research firm Gartner. That estimate might be conservative, if this higher-ticket marketplace follows the hockey-stick growth curve of the consumer market.

Perhaps the greatest driver behind the proliferation of industrial apps is time—increasingly the most important underlying value proposition in everything we do. How do we optimize time for customers and employees? How do we shave time off of production and distribution? How do we make more responsive, real-time decisions?

By leveraging time, industrial apps will revolutionize both supply-chain and customer service. Businesses will be able track products from the manufacturing floor to distribution centers and, ultimately, end users. This will help them prototype, iterate and customize products more quickly. As Michael Porter of Harvard Business School predicts, the rise of smart, connected products will unleash a “new era of competition” — with product makers gaining an equal footing with retailers and owners of technology platforms in vying for the consumer.

Not Your Typical App

There are several ways the development of the industrial app economy will look different than the consumer market:

Customization: Industrial apps will often be proprietary and specialized — either tailored to a particular industry or to one particular company.

Cost: Because these are more sophisticated solutions, industrial apps will cost considerably more. The cost will be offset by the fact that they’ll inherently have built-in economies of scale — allowing the organization to distribute the cost of that app across all employees — as well as the operational efficiencies that will impact the bottom line.

Quality: Coders will need to have an advanced skillset with regard to both quality and security. While there’s usually a higher tolerance of bugs with personal apps, industrial solutions will not have anywhere near the same margin for error.

Security: Cybersecurity is one of the costliest and fastest-growing areas of risk for large enterprises. The emergence of the industrial app economy will only exacerbate the potential risks, so developers will spend much of their time and energy securing the underlying code of these apps.

Big Data & Analytics: Perhaps the most important benefit of industrial apps will be the resulting troves of proprietary data companies will have access to. Data from industrial apps will ultimately become one of the most important and leverageable sources of intellectual property (IP) for companies.

Bottom line, in an era when all companies are tech companies, they also must view themselves as data-rich with valuable IP. And as more and more companies seek to optimize operations through the Industrial Internet, the industrial app economy will help power the next industrial revolution.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Jared Weiner is Executive Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer at The Future Hunters.

All views expressed are those of the author.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words. But this one is also worth 10,000 kilowatts.

Though small in stature, the turbine in the photos could contribute to solving some of the world’s biggest energy challenges, not to mention powering an entire town, says Doug Hofer, a steam turbine specialist at GE Global Research.

Full disclosure: The model in Hofer’s hand was 3D-printed from plastic. The real functional version of the turbine, made from high-strength metal, would make the scientist hold up about 150 pounds. But even that’s like lifting a feather. Machines generating this kind of power typically weigh several tons.

GRC’s Hofer says his “minirotor” could power a small town. Image credit: GE Global Research

“This compact machine will allow us to do amazing things,” Hofer says. “The world is seeking cleaner and more efficient ways to generate power. The concepts we are exploring with this machine are helping us address both.”

Here’s how: The medium spinning this turbine isn’t steam but carbon dioxide, squeezed and heated so high that it forms a supercritical fluid. At that level, the difference between gas and liquid basically disappears and gives the CO2 marvelous properties that the turbine harnesses for superefficient power generation.

GE Reports recently ran a piece showing how this turbine can help energy companies turn CO2 into cleaner power. But Hofer and other GE researchers believe it can do a lot more and address other big energy challenges. In addition to the CO2 program with the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), GE is working on other programs with the U.S. Department of Energy.

One is looking at using this technology to increase the efficiency of centralized power plants. Hofer and his team are gathering insights that could allow them to scale the technology to the 500 megawatt range — enough to power a large city. The research could lead to smaller “large” turbines that are more efficient in the future. “With energy demand expected to rise by 50 percent over the next two decades, we can’t afford to wait for new, cleaner energy solutions to power the planet,” Hofer says. “We have to innovate now and make energy generation as efficient as possible. Programs like those we are working on with the U.S. Department of Energy are helping us get there.”

Hofer cautioned that the technology is in its early stages of development. But he and his team are planning to take it for a spin later this year.

Following the climate breakthrough in Paris, there’s reason to be more optimistic about curbing emissions. Renewables can play a key role in that effort.

The Paris climate talks were widely hailed as a potential game-changer in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But success will hinge on implementation — whether the 195 countries come through on their promise to take action to limit the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Key to that effort will be transforming power markets, which account for 40 percent of energy-related CO² emissions. Transitioning to renewables is expected to play a major role, providing about a third of power generated worldwide by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“I’m a lot more optimistic than I was before Paris,” says Christina Hood, climate policy analyst at the IEA. “I think Paris was a stronger outcome than most expected. It provided a big political boost and reset the idea that we have a common direction of travel.”

Yet while the transition to a low-emissions economy — and energy system — is inevitable, “the question is how quickly we’re going to go in that direction,” Hood said in an interview:

Following the landmark Paris deal, how can private- and public-sector leaders maintain momentum when it comes to supporting renewables?

The Paris agreement was a major political signal for the energy sector and for investors. Now, the big test is going to be turning the words from Paris into actions on the ground.

In part, it’s a continuation of a trajectory that has already begun. Paris gives added impetus to demand for renewables and clean technology. Having so many countries stepping up really increases the size of the market for those technologies, which is going to help accelerate their development.

The expectation in the Paris agreement is that countries will implement policies with the aim of achieving the plans that were submitted. So there’s going to be a spotlight on countries to make sure they are following through with their intended policies, as well.

Given IEA estimates that economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean increasing CO² emissions, how important of a role can renewables play?

This was a package of five key actions, led by energy efficiency and scaling up investment in renewables proposed by the IEA that can lead to a peak in global emissions with zero GDP impact. Obviously the first critical step in heading toward a 2°C Scenario is for emissions to stop rising — and renewables is a really substantial share of that — but those measures need to act as a package.

We’ve really got to shift the thinking from low-carbon as an increased cost to low-carbon as an investment that’s going to pay off — in terms of fuel savings, in particular. In the short term, we can dramatically scale up action and keep climate goals within reach with zero GDP impact. And in the longer term, the increased investment required to get to a 2°C Scenario will pay off.

Declining costs have made renewables more commercially viable, but how concerned are you that the decline in oil and gas prices will hurt the development and deployment of renewable power?

Gas prices have come back from the very high levels we had seen in recent years, but there’s a much bigger package of issues we see around renewables. Gas plays a different role in the power sector than renewables, and they can actually be quite complementary. So it’s not simply a one-to-one tradeoff in terms of the price.

The key issue around increasing the share of renewables is more around wider system integration and the political commitment of governments to really push the transition to low-carbon power — particularly in times of tight government budgets.

Given the IEA’s concern that renewable deployment will fall short of what’s needed to slow global warming due to policy uncertainty, what message would you give to policy makers?

Our message is that it’s not the time to be withdrawing support for renewables. Markets can adapt as technologies mature, but there are systemwide issues. So it’s not just a case of comparing the marginal cost of one technology to another. It’s a matter of ensuring the system overall is able to integrate them properly.

If we’re talking about developed economies with existing power systems, it’s a case of replacing the existing high-emission generation with low-emission generation, and that needs to happen relatively quickly. So there needs to be a strong political push to make this happen. For developing countries, there’s an analogous idea that, when you’re looking at today’s investment, you need to take a long-term perspective.

Sub-Saharan Africa seems poised to be a key beneficiary of renewable generation. What needs to happen for African countries to be able to “leapfrog” to a development model that improves access to sustainable electricity?

Developing countries in Africa and elsewhere are going to have to be supported to find a model of development where emissions per capita is very low by using clean technology.

The happy part of the story is there are now clean technologies that do exist that weren’t available when developed countries went through their development

It’s a huge challenge and a huge opportunity. Africa is rich in energy resources, but there are a lot of issues – political stability, access to capital – that make it more difficult to invest.

The next climate change meeting is taking place in Morocco, so I would expect to hear a lot about Africa initiatives. People will want to see the words from Paris translated into action on the ground in Africa.

Christina Hood is a Climate Policy Analyst at the International Energy Agency.

All views expressed are those of the author.