Saturday, July 03, 2004
Jeffrey’s House of Magic.
Eric Schonfeld talks about Jeff Immelt’s management of innovation at General Electric, and how it’s turning the company into a marketing power player.
GE researcher Anil Duggal is working in a cramped, darkened lab on a replacement for that iconic invention. Duggal holds a flat, glowing 6-inch square that illuminates his face. The light is created by a thin layer of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) sandwiched between two glass plates. Duggal hopes they will eventually be printed on plastic so that flexible lighting surfaces can be incorporated into wallpaper or furniture. Just as the OLEDs convert electricity into light, they can also do the reverse, and thus could someday become the basis for inexpensive plastic solar panels. They could be produced much like newspapers—“and newspapers are so cheap, we throw them away,” Duggal says. Think of the possibilities, adds his colleague Sanjay Correa. “What if your rooftop were made of a cheap material that creates electricity, and then inside, your ceiling could take that electricity and turn it into light,” he muses, a broad smile spreading across his face.
Small annoyance is that Business 2.0 requires that you register to read the entire article online, but I thought it interesting enough to list.