Leonardo da Vinci always seemed to be hungry for new ideas, but sometimes he may have been just hungry. Some 500 years ago, he designed a roasting jack that powered an automatic rotisserie. It used hot air rising from a fireplace to spin a horizontal vane placed in the chimney above it. The vane was attached to a vertical rod that turned the spit, and, presumably, his dinner.
The jack was one of the world’s first turbines and engineers have been using the same principle inside jet engines and power plants ever since. Since high heat can make turbines more efficient, the hot sections of modern turbines operate at temperatures above 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, much higher than Leonardo’s design and near the melting point of steel.
Engineers in GE labs have built a penny-sized sensor that can detect the faintest traces of explosives and needs no power to operate. The device uses a special film a tenth the thickness of a human hair to detect chemicals. The team was inspired by their research of the unique iridescence of Morpho butterflies caused by the jagged, forest-like scales found on their wings. (They applied data analytics developed for their bio-inspired Morpho light and temperature sensors to the new radiofrequency (RF) bomb sensors.)
Is your company ready to compete in a world of smart, connected products? For some time now we’ve been living into a smarter world filled with Big Data and analytics, and a more connected one that’s been described as “the internet of things.” In this world, customers expect their suppliers to surround their products with data services and digitally enhanced experiences. This means that many organizations and their leaders are running as fast as they can to quickly build their software capabilities.
It’s an established fact that the life cycles of companies and many products have been shrinking. But what’s often not appreciated is that culture also has a life cycle and that it, too, is getting shorter.
Culture is often associated with the individual at the helm — so much so that the return of a former chief (Steve Jobs returning to Apple, A.G. Lafley going back to P&G) is often intended and viewed as a kind of restoration. However, true culture turnaround requires a complete psychological shift across the entire organization. It is relatively easy for new organizations to start with a clean sheet of paper in creating a culture. But for organizations that have been around for a while, the shift involves quite a bit of shedding and rewiring.
Like many inventors, Thomas Edison started out as a teenage tinkerer with empty pockets. But his work on improving the telegraph led him to a better stock market ticker and a valuable patent, which he sold for $10,000 to Western Union. He used the money to build a lab in Menlo Park, N.J., and amp up his work with electricity, which attracted venture investments from J.P. Morgan and William Henry Vanderbilt and, eventually, led to GE.
Where does the human end and the machine begin? In the era of neuroprosthetics, tiny electronic devices embedded in the body that stimulate the brain and other parts of the nervous system to improve their function, this question may soon get harder to answer.
Last week, for example, researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, introduced a flexible neural implant that delivers electric and chemical pokes directly to the nervous system. In early trials, it allowed paralyzed rats to walk again with fewer side effects than other treatments.
or more than a century General Electric made most of its revenue by selling industrial hardware and repair services. But in recent years GE was at increasing risk of losing many of its top customers to nontraditional competitors—IBM and SAP on the one hand, and big-data start-ups on the other. Those competitors aimed to shift the customer value proposition away from acquiring reliable industrial equipment to deriving new efficiencies and other benefits through advanced analytics and algorithms based on the data generated by that equipment. The trend threatened to turn GE into a commodity equipment provider.
The company can now offer predictive maintenance and optimization services for more than $1 trillion worth of Internet-connected industrial equipment, ranging from medical equipment to jet engines.
The square, squat robot scuttles across the stage on command, pausing next to a massive model depicting a locomotive engine.
Its sensors probe the surroundings, collecting and analyzing temperatures. Detecting an unusually high reading, it calls for help from a field service agent. When his human colleague arrives, the robot sends its report to his smart eyeglasses, offering step-by-step repair instructions it downloaded from a cloud database.
The leaders of big corporations are learning to think more like entrepreneurs to bring innovative designs to market faster.
Strategies corporations use to act like start-ups include cultivating smaller companies as technology incubators; offering prizes; and paying equal attention to both the design and the market potential of new products.
To meet the challenge of producing products while developing new ones, companies have to simultaneously support old, new and speculative business lines.
When Regina Dugan, former director of DARPA, took to the stage at the 2013 All Things Digital conference in California, it was to explain how she planned to bring fre
Most big corporations follow global development trends. Where there is economic growth, there is opportunity, and the companies that can predict where growth will take place are better positioned to take advantage of it. That is the reactive approach to economic development.
