{"id":403594,"date":"2010-03-08T13:29:29","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T17:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gereports.com\/?p=5361"},"modified":"2010-03-08T13:29:29","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T17:29:29","slug":"twenty-thousand-patents-this-decade-and-counting%e2%80%a6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/403594","title":{"rendered":"Twenty thousand patents this decade, and counting\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>Making GE an \u201cindustrial company first\u201d and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they\u2019re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year\u2019s Annual Report. \u201cIn 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,\u201d writes GE\u2019s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. \u201cWe have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.\u201d One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare\u2019s Al Lojewski explains in the video below, which is part of GE\u2019s online Annual Report: \u201cWe really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As Jeff notes in the letter, \u201cTime magazine called this era \u2018The Decade From Hell,\u2019 and \u2018when you are going through hell,\u2019 Winston Churchill advised, \u2018keep going.\u2019\u201d But in the midst of \u201cone of the worst global economic downturns in history,\u201d the focus on technology R&D continues to be critical to industrial growth. \u201cInfrastructure can fully leverage GE enterprise advantages,\u201d Jeff writes. \u201cMuch of our technology is common to multiple businesses, so we can spread innovations across our portfolio.\u201d Using GE\u2019s investments in renewable energy, oil & gas, water treatment and life sciences over the last decade as examples, Jeff writes: \u201cIn 2000, these businesses were virtually zero; today they generate around $20 billion in revenue. We are currently launching new adjacencies in batteries, avionics and services.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nIdea factory:<\/span> Click on the chart above to expand the view. GE engineers and scientists have filed over 20,000 patents in the 2000’s — that’s twice as many as in the previous decade.<\/div>\n

Those technology investments can have dramatic results when new products eventually hit the market. For example, $1 billion invested in the advanced GEnx<\/a> jet engine has resulted in $15 billion in orders. Likewise, $400 million invested in GE\u2019s Evolution<\/a> line of locomotives has translated into $8 billion in orders. Click here to see a chart<\/a> on these investments and others.<\/p>\n

In addition to technologies such as Vscan in the healthcare sector, GE is also focusing on \u201cintroducing more new products at more price points,\u201d he notes, pointing to the idea of \u201creverse innovation.<\/a>\u201d Writes Jeff: \u201cEssentially, this takes a low-cost, emerging market business model and translates it to the developed world. To this end, we have developed a full line of high-margin, low-cost healthcare devices, designed in China and India, and now marketed successfully in the developed world.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time that GE is rapidly evolving healthcare technologies, teams are also building \u201cstrong bonds with hundreds of community hospital systems like Ochsner, in New Orleans, and Virtua Health, in New Jersey,\u201d Jeff writes. \u201cOver the last decade, we\u2019ve gone beyond supplying them diagnostic imaging equipment. We work just as hard on quality, leadership and productivity solutions. We\u2019ve helped make Ochsner and Virtua two of the highest-quality and most cost-efficient health systems in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

GE\u2019s full online Annual Report will be available at www.ge.com\/investors<\/a> Tuesday morning — when we\u2019ll also bring you a look at some of GE\u2019s smart grid work that is highlighted in the report.<\/p>\n

Learn more about GE\u2019s latest technologies in these GE Reports stories:
\n* Healthymagination technologies<\/a> that lower costs and increase quality and access
\n* Ecomagination technologies<\/a> that are more energy efficient
\n* New projects underway in our labs at GE Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n

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Making GE an \u201cindustrial company first\u201d and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they\u2019re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year\u2019s Annual Report. \u201cIn 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,\u201d writes GE\u2019s Chairman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4069,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}