GE ecomagination Challenge…and the Winners Are

Yesterday GE revealed the five GE Innovation Award winners in New York City: Icecode Technologies, GridON, Capstone Metering, Electric Route Systems and winFlex. The award winners received $100,000 each to get their products and services market-ready.

In addition, GE announced 12 investments in start-ups with five of them being in the smart grid space. It is the first round of GE’s investment $200 million in innovative companies over the next 18 months together with VC partners. The twelve selected start-up companies are: Columbia Engineering, SecureRF, FMC-Tech, Sentient Energy, Joulex, ClimateWell, Scientific Corporation, OPower, Soladigm, Consert, SustainX and SynapSense.

GE received more than 3,600 submissions. 50% of the submissions came from students. More than 50% of the submissions came from outside the U.S said GE’s Beth Comstock.

Throughout the event GE stressed that the company realized that not all of the ideas can be born within GE’s own walls – and that innovation requires an open and collaborative process.

“Creating a clean energy future requires collaboration. GE continues to drive growth and innovation in the clean energy space. We might own 50-60% of the smart grid projects, the rest is white space, open for partners,” said Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE. The challenge was developed based on business goals and not as a “do-good”, CSR initiative. “Working with small innovative companies will help GE grow faster,”  stated Immelt.

Immelt also defined technology as the “liberator to solve business problems.”

Chuck McDermott, general partner at RockPort said that the VC community plays a vital role of nurturing early stage companies to bring innovations to market. According to him the sheer volume of the ideas was attractive for the firm to be a partner of the ecomagination challenge.

In addition to the 12 investments and the innovation awards, GE also announced to invest US$10million dollars  in partnerships with universities to build tech skills.

Panelists commented that U.S. universities have lost their edge and “best-in-class” status. Universities from other parts of the world now offer better skilled students, especially for technology and engineering. The panel discussed the speed at which China is moving in the clean tech sector. China has the highest number of university graduates worldwide.(Side-note: China is also on its way to take the number one spot for patent filings worldwide)

Immelt concluded that the U.S. still has the best entrepreneurial community in the world, especially in the technology space.

But how long could the U.S. remain this lead and what does it take to bring the universities back up to where they were. Considering that already more than 50% of the submissions came from outside of the U.S. and highly skilled IT workers are available in many parts of the world,  and global companies already working with  “transnational” IT teams, innovation could require a broader scale of collaboration as initially imagined.