Twenty-thousand patents this decade, and counting…

Making GE an “industrial company first” and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they’re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year’s Annual Report. “In 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,” writes GE’s chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. “We have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.” One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare’s Al Lojewski explains: “We really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.”

As Jeff notes in the letter, “Time magazine called this era ‘The Decade From Hell,’ and ‘when you are going through hell,’ Winston Churchill advised, ‘keep going.’” But in the midst of “one of the worst global economic downturns in history,” the focus on technology R&D continues to be critical to industrial growth. “Infrastructure can fully leverage GE enterprise advantages,” Jeff writes. “Much of our technology is common to multiple businesses, so we can spread innovations across our portfolio.” Using GE’s investments in renewable energy, oil & gas, water treatment and life sciences over the last decade as examples, Jeff writes: “In 2000, these businesses were virtually zero; today they generate around $20 billion in revenue. We are currently launching new adjacencies in batteries, avionics and services.”

Idea factory: Click on the chart above to expand the view. GE engineers and scientists have filed over 20,000 patents in the 2000’s — that’s twice as many as in the previous decade.

Those technology investments can have dramatic results when new products eventually hit the market. For example, $1 billion invested in the advanced GEnx jet engine has resulted in $15 billion in orders. Likewise, $400 million invested in GE’s Evolution line of locomotives has translated into $8 billion in orders. Click here to see a chart on these investments and others.

In addition to technologies such as Vscan in the healthcare sector, GE is also focusing on “introducing more new products at more price points,” he notes, pointing to the idea of “reverse innovation.” Writes Jeff: “Essentially, this takes a low-cost, emerging market business model and translates it to the developed world. To this end, we have developed a full line of high-margin, low-cost healthcare devices, designed in China and India, and now marketed successfully in the developed world.”

At the same time that GE is rapidly evolving healthcare technologies, teams are also building “strong bonds with hundreds of community hospital systems like Ochsner, in New Orleans, and Virtua Health, in New Jersey,” Jeff writes. “Over the last decade, we’ve gone beyond supplying them diagnostic imaging equipment. We work just as hard on quality, leadership and productivity solutions. We’ve helped make Ochsner and Virtua two of the highest-quality and most cost-efficient health systems in the country.”

GE’s full online Annual Report will be available at www.ge.com/investors on March 9 — when we’ll also bring you a look at some of GE’s smart grid work that is highlighted in the report.

Learn more about GE’s latest technologies in these GE Reports stories:
* Healthymagination technologies that lower costs and increase quality and access
* Ecomagination technologies that are more energy efficient
* New projects underway in GE labs at GE Global Research