Lighting the GE Way

Contrary to popular lore, Thomas Edison didn't invent the first lightbulb. That was Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, a British chemist, physicist, and inventor. Edison simply came up with one that could burn for 600 hours instead of 40, making it the first commercially viable "electric lamp" in history.

For scientists at General Electric's global research facility in Niskayuna, New York, that's more than trivia. It's a guiding principle for Anil Duggal, 38, an amiable chemistry researcher who is trying to pull off an Edison-like feat. Duggal and a cross-disciplinary team of scientists at the center want to develop a new kind of electric lamp using an emerging technology called organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), most easily thought of as light-up plastic.

Why? Call it creative destruction. Or, for the slightly more jaded perspective, call it a Hail Mary pass to salvage the iconic but struggling GE Lighting business (now part of GE's $14 billion consumer and industrial division). In 2002, it lost all of its Home Depot business to rival Philips. That single defeat wiped out a full 7% of the unit's annual sales. Business hasn't improved much since. And in a commodity line such as lighting, Duggal's work also fits in nicely with CEO Jeffrey Immelt's push to foster innovations that let GE widen its margins with hard-to-copy products rather than competing on incremental improvements and price.

What's most striking about GE's renewed interest in innovation is not so much the technologies themselves, but how the company gets them from lab to market. "As a scientist, you have to figure out what makes this place tick. And it's not just technology," Duggal says of GE's research center. "If you can't sell a project, then you're going to have a hard time here." So OLEDs may not be GE's most cutting-edge research project -- that might be its nanotechnology or molecular-medicine efforts. But it is a technology that may one day save GE's flagging lighting business by, ironically, driving a stake through the lightbulb as we know it. So OLEDs provide an intriguing window onto how the company integrates long-range research into today's strategic planning and how new ideas get through the system without getting thwarted, blocked, or worse. How do you usher in a game-changing innovation that's years away from completion? Here's GE's shot at solving one of the oldest problems in business.

OLEDs are organic versions of LEDs -- the stuff that makes our cell-phone buttons light up -- with a couple of key differences. For starters, instead of emitting a single bright point of light like LEDs do, OLEDs produce a patch of light over a wider area. Second, OLEDs consist of a thin, flexible, plasticlike material, unlike LEDs, which are fabricated as rigid semiconductor chips -- a process that would be laughably expensive for general lighting. Duggal hopes that the thin material will one day be printed using a cheap roll-to-roll process, as newspapers are. That flexibility opens up a range of imaginative possibilities, from lit ceiling tiles that would replace fluorescent overheads to illuminated curtains.

Duggal began to take serious notice of OLEDs about five years ago. As a chemist in corporate R&D, he had a general interest in the technology as far back as 1989, when it was pioneered at Cambridge University. It wasn't until scientists showed that OLEDs could produce a white light, spelling opportunity for general lighting, that Duggal's interest was fully piqued.

"Every year, OLED performance was getting exponentially better," he says. "One day I started plotting lines on a piece of paper showing this exponential growth, comparing it with conventional incandescent and fluorescent lighting technology. And you could see the lines start to intersect. So I'm thinking, If we're a lighting company, there's both an opportunity and a threat here. This is a technology that could overtake us, and suddenly our own lighting business becomes meaningless."

Inspired (and frightened) by his sketch, Duggal began chasing some seed money within the company to see how OLEDs might fit in with GE's existing businesses. He was able to convince a handful of executive managers at the lab, and he got the money he needed to start. But to boost the project's initial funding and its staff from just Duggal to a team of five, he enlisted the help of Greg Chambers. At the time, Chambers was one of GE's business program managers -- a liaison between the global research center and one of GE's business units. Together, they secured a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study OLEDs as an efficient lighting alternative.

When Immelt took the reins in 2001 with a renewed focus on innovation, Duggal knew that this leadership change was his opportunity. Under Jack Welch, who considered investing in new technology to be a "wild swing," OLEDs would have likely remained a side project. Now they could be a full-time calling. It became a matter of Duggal building support for the technology among scientists and engineers as well as the marketers and sales forces in the business units. "They said, 'Yes, we think it's important for GE to be in this,' " says Duggal.