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The first GE research lab opened in a barn behind a scientist’s home in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1900. The wooden structure employed three people before it burned down a year later (see below).
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It was an inauspicious beginning for one of the largest corporate research institutions in the world. GE Global Research now runs a string of nine labs stretching across the U.S. to Brazil, China, Germany, India and Israel.
The research network employs some 3,000 scientists solving bespoke problem for GE businesses building everything from locomotives to wind turbines and jet engines, and writing software. Over the years, the labs have employed several Nobel laureates and nurtured technologies like LEDs, brain MRI, and new composite materials. GE expects to invest $17 billion in R&D this year, or about 5 percent of revenues.
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Top image: Dr. Seyed Saddoughi and his team have developed a family of devices called synthetic jet actuators. They work like tiny bellows and make air and water flow more efficiently over aircraft wings, wind turbine blades and boat hulls. They can even cool electronics. Above: GE CT technology can probe the the brain as well as aircraft parts.
Outside the labs, there are 47,000 other engineers working at GE. The real payoff comes when they pool their expertise, cross business boundaries and come up with innovative ways to crack tough problems. GE CEO Jeff Immelt calls this approach the "GE store.”
“The business of research is not the business of Eureka moments,” says Mark Little, who runs GE Global Research (GRC). “It’s the business of planning strategic approaches to things, hard work, and patience.” Little is hosting an investor conference at GE’s research headquarters in Schenectady today, not too far from where the original lab once stood.
GE’s industrial businesses generated $108 billion in revenues in 2015, up 7 percent compared to the previous year. Once you start looking under the hood of GE machines, you can find the GE store everywhere. The company’s fleet of mobile power plants, for example, uses technologies originally developed for jet engines. The wind business has been looking at superconducting magnets developed for magnetic resonance machines to maximize electricity output.
But perhaps the best example of this technology mashup is GE’s latest Evolutions Series diesel-electric locomotive that meets the government’s new Tier 4 pollution limits.
The Evolution Series Tier 4 Locomotive. Hover over the yellow hotspots to reveal GE Store contributions. Click here to see the full size infographic.
The locomotive’s power, fuel and exhaust systems, turbochargers and other technology combine contributions from six different GE businesses (see infographic above). GE says that as a result, the locomotive cuts NOx emissions by 76 percent, particulate matter emissions by 70 percent, compared to previous models. It can also save customers $1.5 billion in expensive infrastructure costs they would otherwise have to make to meet the EPA regulations.
The GE store itself is an innovation that’s turning heads. “In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines,” says Yale biologist and Nobel winner James E. Rothman, who as former chief scientist at GE Healthcare still visits the labs in Schenectady. “I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GRC…That sort of non-quantifiable knowledge has a way of leveraging across the whole of GE.”