The New Polymath: featuring GE Global Research
“The Last Days of the Mohicans—the James Fenimore Cooper classic set in 1757—the movies it spawned, and the critical discussion it encouraged paint a vivid picture of the birthing motions of a New World. In the valley in Niskayuna, New York, where the Mohicans, the Mohawk, and the Huron roamed and schemed with the Dutch, the French, and the English, a new tribe has emerged at GE Global Research. There are no scalps to show off these days, but there are plenty of patents, Nobel Prizes, and other recognitions.”
I am the author of an upcoming book, The New Polymath, which features the Global Research Center and many of its technologists. A polymath is Greek for a Renaissance person like Leonardo Da Vinci or Ben Franklin, good at many disciplines. The New Polymath, in my book, is an enterprise which amalgamates 3,5,10 strands of infotech, biotech, nanotech, cleantech, healthtech to create innovative new solutions. I am a former Gartner analyst and write an innovation blog which catalogs over 40 categories of technology from mobile computing to genetics.
The book research had already been a wonderful experience as I interviewed over a hundred innovators around the globe including some at BP, the large energy company, the National Hurricane Center, the cleantech portfolio at the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, salesforce.com, Plantronics and at several GE units, including Corporate IT and GEHC.
But my visit to Niskayuna in January was one of the highlights of the book research process. I had just read your blog post on “Santa’s sleigh” with hydrophobic coatings and cruise control using the Trip Optimizer and wanted to see the “toys” for myself.
Patrick Jarvis and Todd Alhart in your communications team put a packed day together. I met with Roland Sedziol who explained how Global Research integrates with GE’s business units and elaborated on some of the unique GE techniques like “Session T”. Paul Myers and Jonathan Janssen gave me a tour of the Pilot Development Center and talked about the GE Manufacturing Readiness Levels methodology. Glen Merfeld proudly showed off his sodium-nickel fuel cells. Robert Filkins showed his ability with the Xbox controller – around the digital pathology Omnyx offering. I walked by holographic disks, sheets of OLED, and heard about your global centers in Bangalore, Shanghai and Munich and what’s in your labs.
Conversations in the cafeteria, in the hallways, and at the 40-room lodge attached to the center effortlessly drift from pathology to holography, from one “aha” to another. The Global Research ethos is “Innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines.” So, put chemists, mathematicians, engineers of all stripes, and biologists in close proximity and who knows where the conversations will lead. It is a great setting for what the Kate Beckinsale character in the movie Serendipity calls “fortunate accidents.”
I have 10 pages in the book which summarize the Polymath nature of the Center. Honestly, I could have written a whole book on the “Magic Factory”.
My book comes out in June from John Wiley and Co. You can preorder now at amazon. Also, you can see on-going excerpts on the Facebook page and the LinkedIn group for the book.
Invigorating as your Center is, I think you will enjoy reading about your peer innovators in the other corporate labs and also in places you may not expect much innovation – in the farms of Ireland, the streets of Estonia, the hills of Macedonia and the backroads of Rwanda.
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