产业技术领域的“同行评价”

武夷山

Research-Technology Management杂志2012年第4期发表Michael Idelchik（GE全球科研部负责先进技术的副总裁）和Sam Kogan（战略与技术顾问）合写的文章，GE’s Open Collaboration Model（通用电气的开放协同模型）。文章介绍说：

GE培育了一个由业务开发侦查员（Scouts）所组成的网络，这些产业技术领域的侦查员很注意与世界各地的创新集群进行接触，尤其是以色列、日本、俄罗斯的创新集群。他们的侦查员也关注印度、中国、德国和美国的情况。

博主：可以认为，这些侦查员愿意接触哪些国家，就说明那些国家在特定领域的产业竞争力比较强，从而可以作为判定国家产业竞争力的一个重要指标。

懂行的侦查员关注了哪些国家，就相当于在产业技术领域做出了正面的同行评价。这也许比有关国家产生了多少专利更能说明问题。

原文如下：

Eight years after the creation of General Electric in 1892,

Chief Engineer Charles Steinmetz began lobbying for the

company to open a dedicated research laboratory. One of

Thomas Edison’s GE cofounders, Elihu Thomson, wrote in

support of the idea: “ . . . a company as large as the General

Electric Company, should not fail to continue investing and

developing in new fields: there should, in fact, be a research

laboratory for commercial applications of new principles, and

even for the discovery of those principles.” 1 With Thomson’s

support, Steinmetz opened GE’s first Global Research

Laboratory in the barn behind his house in Schenectady,

New York, hiring MIT chemistry professor Willis Whitney as

its first director. From these humble beginnings, through decades

of innovative breakthroughs, GE Global Research has

evolved into a globe-spanning network of idea factories, with

locations in New York, Silicon Valley, Munich, Bangalore,

Shanghai, and soon, Rio de Janeiro. In addition to expanding

its traditional corporate R&D operation, GE has transformed

its approach to Thomson’s “discovery of [new] principles” in

recent years by adopting a strategy of open collaboration:

reaching out beyond the company and its advanced labs to

collaborate with new and different kinds of external partners

to innovate new technologies and bring the resulting new

products to scaled markets faster.

This article will explore GE’s experience with open collaboration

in markets adjacent to the company’s core businesses.

Adjacencies are one of three key areas of innovation

focus at GE, in addition to core businesses and new businesses.

GE’s approach to growing into adjacent markets has

involved leveraging both external and internal resources, tying

them to clearly defined operating mechanisms to deliver

innovations at the accelerated speed that has become the default

in venture capital–driven adjacencies like clean tech

and health care. The new strategy has been pursued with the

recognition that none of the stakeholders leading the growth

of these adjacencies is going to wait for GE to catch up; indeed,

it was crucial for GE to connect to the venture capital

and entrepreneur communities to understand the dynamics

of these ecosystems. That understanding led to an overarching

strategic premise: GE must be agnostic about the source

of the best and most promising new ideas. Thus, the measure

of success is this formulation: Can GE pick the best ideas for

breakthroughs, regardless of where they come from, manage

the risk associated with them, use workable collaboration

models as needed, and develop the necessary technology and

markets to speed business adoption and ultimately growth?

The answer so far is, resoundingly, yes.

Core and New Business Innovation

For over 60 years, GE has successfully innovated in its core

businesses, such as aircraft engines, turbines, and diagnostic

imaging healthcare equipment. Undergirding this traditional

innovation strength is deep domain expertise in materials

science, manufacturing processes, devices, components,

subsystems, and engineering tools, along with experience

in applications and supply chain. New technologies in

core businesses take, on average, from five to ten years to

develop.

An example is GE’s strategy in its core aviation business,

to develop lower-weight, higher-temperature materials for

jet engines. GE Global Research formulated and patented a

TiAl alloy material in 1989. GE Aviation first tested an

engine incorporating the alloy in 1993 and then committed

it and its manufacturing technology for use in the GEnx

engine, which has become the best-selling engine for the

new Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental and 787 Dreamliner,

certified by the FAA in 2007. GE became the first engine

maker in the world to introduce a TiAl alloy into production.

From start to finish, the innovation took a long time

but helped GE to achieve leadership in a core business. Similarly,

GE Healthcare’s Gemstone spectral imaging technology,

which led to the first quantitative dual-energy CT

scanner on the market, took five years to iterate from idea

to product. Even when innovating in core businesses occurs

through acquisition instead of organically, the due diligence

process is extensive.

To keep the core business innovation pipeline full of

breakthroughs like the TiAl alloy and Gemstone spectral

imaging, GE’s technologists are constantly benchmarking,

scanning the competitive landscape to assess whether and

how externally developed technology can be adapted or acquired

to provide competitive advantage. GE adopted a

grassroots model for collaboration with universities, national

labs, and institutes and has hundreds of researchers

investigating collaborations globally. For example, in 2011,

GE acquired a unique magnetic resonance imaging technology

from a spinoff from the University of Minnesota. This

technology allows visualization of tendons, ligaments, and

other tissues not visible with conventional imaging

methods.

GE also has clearly delineated, formal business-development

processes for acquiring or building new businesses. Of course, these processes involve significant due diligence and

planning. For example, in recent years, GE has entered the

entirely new businesses of wind turbines, oil and gas subsea

and topside systems; cancer molecular diagnostics; and batteries.

While GE had long maintained a core power-generation

business centered on gas and steam turbines, in 2002 GE

Energy acquired the wind business assets of bankrupt

Enron. Similarly, in 2010, GE Healthcare bought Clarient, a

molecular diagnostic company that enabled the business to

enter a new healthcare market. In 2004, GE determined

that developing a different kind of battery for lower-cost

energy storage was a strategic imperative, and in 2010, the

company was ready to commit to the manufacturing of the

new product.

Towards a Model of Open Collaboration for Growth in

Adjacent Businesses

Some of the fastest-moving and elusive business opportunities

for companies are adjacencies, which arise near to existing

core areas of focus. Expansion into these neighboring

markets doesn’t require the extensive investigation and vetting

that precedes a move into entirely new businesses, but it

also can’t be undertaken with the confidence born of experience

in core businesses. In recent years, adjacencies like clean

tech have become increasingly prominent. GE decided that if

it didn’t establish connections to the venture capital community

and the larger ecosystem of venture capitalists and startups

in this emerging space, the company ran the risk of

missing significant innovations. To stay on pace and work

with dynamic upstarts, GE needed a new collaborative

model.

A logical first step was to partner with some of the venture

capitalists that support new ventures in these markets. Under

CEO and Chairman Jeff Immelt’s leadership, GE Capital set

up two funds—one for clean tech, part of the larger $20 billion

 Energy Financial Services, and one for healthcare

technologies seeded with $250 million. Another way to partner

with venture capitalists—and to collaborate with startups

and academic researchers—has been through open

innovation challenges. For example, the ecomagination

Challenge began as an experiment to find and fund the best

new ideas related to powering the grid and the home, the

latter a business “on the other side of the meter” from GE’s

traditional core of power generation and distribution. With a

judging panel of roughly a dozen GE leaders, venture capital

partners, and independent experts in place, GE announced

the challenge, expecting a few hundred submissions

at most. What came next was a deluge: 4,000 ideas from

inventors and entrepreneurs in 160 countries. To accommodate

early-stage start-ups that were not ready for a bigger

investment but had promise and could benefit from continued

incubation, GE created the $20 million ecomagination

Innovation Fund, an accelerator program that

supports commercial pilot programs through which entrepreneurs

can work closely with relevant commercial

leaders at GE to further develop their innovations. GE

selected fi ve startups for $100,000 innovation awards

and invested in 14 companies that entered the ecomagination

Challenge, even acquiring one of them, Irish

smart-grid company FMC Tech. A new healthymagination

Challenge was launched last fall, with the first five

winners selected last month, for promising innovations

in breast cancer detection and diagnostics.

In addition, GE has developed a network of business development

scouts to engage with innovation clusters around

the world, including in Israel, Japan, and Russia. These scouts

join GE Global Research scouts in India, China, Germany,

and the United States in tapping into local entrepreneur and

innovation networks.

Finally, GE has also introduced new TRIZ-based tools developed

by innovation services firm GEN3 Partners. GEN3

and GE trainers have been training GE’s internal innovators

to help them effectively identify and assess new, functionally

related tech opportunities in analogous industries. Training

also includes guidance about how to understand how technology

evolves so that researchers can better gauge the potential

of new innovations.

GE has begun to build a platform for growth in adjacencies

from these new groupings of external and internal innovators,

one that has durable operating mechanisms and

promotes a supportive incubation culture, in no small part

from working closely with smaller companies, researchers,

and venture capitalists and learning about the challenges

they face.

Open Collaboration: Lessons Learned and Looking

Ahead

In collaborating with external partners, from VCs to startups,

GE has faced challenges that naturally arise from opening

up a formerly closed system and incorporating outside

perspectives. Take IP protection. For decades, GE has boasted

a high-integrity culture imbued with deep respect for protecting

intellectual property. That reputation has helped reassure

understandably cautious inventors and entrepreneurs

that GE is not partnering with them to steal or otherwise appropriate

their technology, but to provide support and to

learn. Still, setting up transparent nondisclosure processes

and guidelines to govern every step of the relationship has

been important in reinforcing mutual trust, which is the key

to any collaboration, but especially one involving entities of

vastly different sizes and often with different interests and

perspectives.

Navigating the issues of trust and IP endemic to open collaboration

projects has also helped transform the way GE

innovates internally. After the experience of asking startups

to trust GE on IP, company researchers realized that in

some internal projects, GE hadn’t been showing the same

trust to some of the collaborators who might become customers

of the technology being developed. A good example

is the development of hypopolarized C13, a carbon 13 isotope,

for in vivo metabolic imaging technology for GE

Healthcare. Researchers hoped the new technology would

lead to a new imaging modality combining the best parts of

PET and MRI to scan for metabolic-related diseases, but the

project’s novelty and unknown risks meant it had to undergo

at least five years of preclinical research involving

animal testing. While the project generated positive results

that were published in numerous scientific journals, the

feedback from collaborators was that GE was “too controlling”

of IP and had been limiting external opportunities that

some of the collaborators wanted to pursue. With the positive

lessons provided by recent open collaboration projects

fresh in their minds, GE researchers responded to these

concerns by creating the Research Circle, which offered

much more flexible IP and terms and conditions to allow

collaborators to share and debate concepts, results, and new

opportunities, strengthening relationships and opening the

door to new ideas.

Overall, working with external partners on due diligence,

collaborating with start-ups, and creating new models

like the Research Circle have dispelled reservations some

had going in about an unknown process. Doubts that GE

researchers would be motivated to work on the ideas of

outsiders were quickly allayed, as the new perspectives

brought by external partners energized and inspired internal

innovators.

Open collaboration is a new R&D model for GE, one

spurred by a motivation to contribute to and learn from the

innovation ecosystem surrounding venture capitalists and

entrepreneurs in markets adjacent to GE’s traditional businesses.

Tearing down the lab walls, so to speak, and collaborating

with these new partners has allowed GE to see

around the corner, spot new technology and business

trends, and make informed strategic decisions in growing

adjacencies. In time, the differences between open collaboration

and open innovation will blur further. Today’s model

for open collaboration at GE is a flexible model that will

continue to evolve and adapt as GE continues to search for

the best innovations, moderate their risk, and accelerate

business adoption and growth.