Arcam AB fka AMAVF

[charlie T colton]

GE Chief On Big Data, Disruptive Technologies And Climate Change

At aviationweek.com - GE Chief On Big Data, Disruptive Technologies And Climate Change - Apr 10, 2017

Several topics are discussed in the interview. There's one prompt where Jeff Immelt includes his thoughts on additive manufacturing in his response.


Aviation Week Editor-in-Chief Joe Anselmo
GE has invested a lot of money in Predix, which connects machines with big data and the internet. Help us understand how and when that’s going to change the economics of airplane engines.

General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt
From an aviation standpoint, it’s definitely going to reduce the cost of ownership around an engine and improve key metrics like fuel efficiency, on-time flights and safety. As importantly, it should lower our costs and speed to market with new engines. Whatever you want to call it—Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, everybody has their own words—that plus additive manufacturing are the two biggest technical disruptions that I’ve seen in my 35-year GE career.

One of the advantages we have across the company is size and scale. So we’ll (invest) about $5.5 billion this year just in pure software. We’ve been able to build it pretty quickly, and I think we’re still in the early days.

Additive manufacturing is extremely disruptive from a materials, design and speed standpoint. Sometimes it’s hard when you’re a business leader, because not every idea is a good one and some are just cartoons. I think (Blue Origin founder) Jeff Bezos is amazing, but I don’t want to die on Mars. The hardest thing for any business leader is to keep your mind open enough to pick what’s next but disciplined enough not to have too many hobbies, not to follow too many cartoons.