Lighting the GE Way

When it came time to present OLEDs as a candidate for advanced technology funding, Chambers quips that he went in and told his bosses that "GE should invent a new lightbulb every hundred years or so."

Turns out, he was only half joking. While the OLED market for displays in products such as cell phones is a crowded and competitive one, with at least 25 serious players chasing it, nobody but Philips and Sylvania seemed to be going after the general lighting market. "A lot of low-hanging fruit is still available in lighting," Duggal told people at GE at the time, referring to the relative lack of competition. The project won approval as an advanced technology program, one of six, and as a result, its funding increased into the millions, and the staff grew to 30. "The places that we've decided we can take a pretty long-term look and take on a fair bit of risk are in what we call 'sustainable industries,'" says Scott Donnelly, senior VP for corporate R&D. "I have a very hard time thinking that people aren't going to need energy 20 years from now."

OLEDs still face a long road. "You may start to see OLEDs showing up in niche architectural lighting in 8 to 10 years," says Kimberly Allen, the director of technology and strategic research for iSuppli/Stanford Resources, a market research firm. "But you won't see something like flexible lighting for 15 or even 20 years." In fact, Allen says, the size of the OLED market for general lighting is impossible to forecast because so many technical questions remain unanswered.

This isn't news to GE. Proving commercial viability becomes more important as OLEDs develop. Scientists do their part through a process called "toll gating," in which they incrementally tackle risks that a promising technology will turn out to be a dud. Right now, Duggal's team is at work on improving the brightness and duration of OLED lighting. In March 2004, they successfully demonstrated that their prototype could match a standard incandescent bulb's light output. But the ultimate goal is to produce an OLED about seven times better than that, superior to even fluorescents.

The other major hurdle is solving the production problems that would let you print OLEDs as you would a newspaper. OLEDs need to be hermetically sealed to work. Today that's accomplished by sandwiching the OLED material between two layers of glass. That's why it's premature to talk about roll-to-roll production. "In a way, those lines I plotted that showed the potential of OLEDs were deceptive, because there were things missing -- like manufacturing," says Duggal. "These are challenging problems. But we can either be scared by them or find a way to work around them."

While Duggal's team works on those issues, a business unit's sales and marketing teams gather input about the technology from likely future customers. The net effect of this dance is that a technology must continually prove its market mettle if it hopes to continue along GE's path from lab to market. In theory, that means no new GE technology will hit the market unless there are customers already lined up.

How then does a technology like OLEDs not get lost in the strategic shuffle at a behemoth like GE, with $134 billion in annual sales? The answer lies in the company's yearly strategic planning process known as the S-1.

Contained within the consumer and industrial division's S-1 is a category labeled "innovation," under which projects fall into one of two subcategories: big bets and breakthroughs. OLEDs are listed as a breakthrough now, meaning they're still a corporate research project. Once technically viable, OLEDs would likely move to a big bet, where funding and technical development get handed over to the business unit. "If consumer and industrial were to go to corporate with their strategic plan and not have OLEDs on there, Scott Donnelly and Jeff Immelt would ask, 'Why are we investing in this technology if there doesn't seem to be a home for it in the future?'" says Todd Graves, the business program manager who is now responsible for shepherding OLEDs.

The final stage of the development process for a technology like OLEDs comes when consumer and industrial's innovation team -- a group created four years ago to smooth a project's transition from corporate research to the business unit -- hands it off to the new-product division. The scientists have eliminated all the invention risks. Now another team of engineers transforms the raw technology into a marketable product, a process that typically takes 12 to 18 months, according to Kevin Nolan, consumer and industrial's general manager for new-product introductions.

Duggal realizes the challenge of ever getting that far. "It's very possible that OLEDs won't work," Duggal says coolly. "Of course I'd be disappointed. But if I wanted something easy, I wouldn't have taken them on. As a young scientist who goes into industry, instead of a university, you want to change the world. I think OLEDs are something that can change the world." Edison couldn't have said it better.

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