The Industrial Internet (CT Exclusive Videos)

Following up on my post about GE’s new PowerUp technology for wind turbines, below is a little more background on “the Industrial Internet,” the broader screenplay in which PowerUp is just one scene. (Full disclosure: GE funded and organized my trip to the GE Minds + Machines 2013 in Chicago. Nonetheless, GE has not made any specific content requests and had no influence in the production of this article.)

First are a few videos of GE CEO and Chairman Jeffrey Immelt as well as other speakers giving a summary of the Industrial Internet idea (not an easy task). After those is a short video interview I conducted with Immelt after the event. Not a lot is added there, but the presentation left me with a couple questions I wanted to ask Immelt, so I did. I also threw in a short solar power question which I’ll actually follow up on in another post.

Here’s Immelt’s broad overview of GE’s new Industrial Internet initiative:

Here’s Florian Zettelmeyer, J.L. and Hellen Kellogg Professor of Marketing at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, further discussing the types of opportunities available here:

And here’s William Ruh, Vice President of Global Software at GE, further adding his own words on what makes the Industrial Internet unique and important:

Last is my brief interview with Immelt. Notably, I really wasn’t expecting to have the opportunity to interview Immelt (it wasn’t on my agenda), and very little information was provided about the topic of the event beforehand anyway, so I hadn’t spent much time preparing questions for this. Nonetheless, a couple questions did pop into my head that I figured I’d quickly ask him in this ad-hoc interview.

I have also been curious about GE’s decision to jump into the solar module business and then quickly pull out of it, so I took the opportunity to implicitly ask about that. Much more on that topic will come later when I share videos from my interview with the head of GE’s renewable energy division.

Here’s the video:

The iPad app I use to upload many videos to YouTube seemed to hit some sort of weird glitch when I was first uploading the above interview. If you want to have a little fun, here’s another version of that interview:

For a little more fun, here’s a slightly altered image of Immelt and the Vice Chairman and Chief Revenue Officer of United that Immelt presented at the end of the event to capture one of the key goals of the Industrial Internet: