To smaller companies, looking for the next big thing is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. For large companies like GE, it is easier because GE can plan far ahead and invest billions. When GE identifies a market, it is BIG and it means they are getting ready to dominate. GE has announced that it is targeting the ‘Industrial Internet’ as the next big growth arena. In a recent shareholder letter CEO Jeffrey Immelt outlined the company’s technology and market plans:
“We are making a major investment in software and analytics. We know that industrial companies need to be in the software business. We want to make the analytics around our products, real-time data, and operating solutions a GE core competency. We have built a Software and Analytical Center of Excellence in California, where we are adding a vast array of human talent to achieve our goals. We know that our services in the coming years depend on building smarter machines with the ability to extract and analyse data. This is the power of the Industrial Internet.
“The Industrial Internet leverages the power of the cloud to connect machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software to other machines (and to us) so we can extract data, make sense of it, and find meaning where it did not exist before. Machines from jet engines to gas turbines to CT scanners will have the analytical intelligence to self-diagnose and self-correct. They will be able to deliver the right information to the right people, all in real-time. When machines can sense conditions and communicate, they become instruments of understanding. They create knowledge from which we can act quickly, saving money and producing better outcomes.”
Immelt’s Industrial Internet speaks to the addition of intelligence, via sensors and connected networking technology, to take mechanical devices to the next level. This concept is indeed something we’ve often discussed as the next big industrial growth arena: The Internet of Things (IoT).
For a giant like GE, which makes everything from locomotive engines to light bulbs, this means products that are smart enough to help themselves. We have been writing about ‘the pervasive Internet’ and IoT for years, and now GE is identifying it as a targeted growth arena.
Immelt says industrial demand for increases in productivity will help drive this market transformation, whether for healthcare or transportation or energy.
The size of this opportunity? Immelt says this market could be about $15 trillion by 2030. He estimates this to be the equivalent of adding another US economy to the world. I have never, ever come across any market forecasts of this magnitude. The Internet of Things era has begun.
Industrial robotics revolution
In the early 1960s when industrial robots were first introduced on assembly lines, they were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. Even after a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that is pretty much still how industrial robots operate today.
But, here comes Rodney Brooks again, the MIT Professor of Robotics who helped launch Roomba the popular home vacuum cleaner robot. Now he has left a tenured position at MIT to focus on his latest company: Rethink Robotics. Venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the company. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was the company’s first investor.
Says Brooks, today’s robotics technology is going to look incredibly primitive in a couple of decades. He has told people that the company is working on the robotics version of the iPhone. Robots will be capable of being ‘trained’ to perform repetitive tasks with their moving arms and grippers. Versatile software will be intuitive to use and will spawn a community of software ‘apps’ which will be developed by a growing community of developers to serve a wide variety of operations or manufacturing tasks.
Rethink Robotics’ Baxter is a two-armed robot with a computer-screen face with animated eyes. It stands about 3 feet and is currently priced at $22 000, but targeted to eventually sell for about $5000. It is designed to do tasks such as loading and unloading, sorting and looking after other machinery, jobs typically done by people.
Most workers can learn to operate Baxter within about a half hour. Workers can ‘teach’ it to do tasks by guiding the arms to an object; cameras embedded in the wrists can determine how to grasp the object. Baxter has a puzzled look on its computer-screen face when it is still learning; it nods when it understands. Most industrial robots are larger, one-armed machines whose tasks include lifting heavy objects, cutting metal or welding. They typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The price, ease of use and flexibility of Baxter could put it into lots of small and medium-sized business and rejuvenate conventional manufacturing. Which, of course, will make Rodney Brooks’ company a major success.
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
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