The people connection
GE makes a statement in opening Calgary innovation centre
Conversations be-tween the right people and in the right environment can lead to obscene sums of cash.
By opening a Global Innovation Centre in Calgary this week, the first of its kind in North America, General Electric Co. has made its commitment to that ethos clear.
“You won’t see labs here,” John Rice, chief executive of the company’s global growth and operations division, said in an interview amid grand- opening celebrations. “This is more about people collaboration. So we have engineers that are working on problems and looking for answers that might end up in labs to be tested and evaluated. But this is where ideas are generated that will then need to be tested.”
Slick conference tables flanked on all sides by interactive touchscreen displays stand in place of sterile cleanrooms. Wall- sized video conferencing stations instead of electrical analytic tools and intimate meeting rooms containing nothing but a small circle of chairs — and perhaps an inspirational quote from Thomas Edison or another famed personality from GE’S past — have created an entirely new take on the tired old image of a corporate R& D centre filled with white- coated scientists standing over petri dishes and scribbling down notes.
The concept is novel and GE says it is the first of its kind in North America, though it is the company’s second globally, having opened its first innovation centre in Chengdu, China, just last week. Opening a similar location gives Calgary easy access to the Fairfield Conn.- based innovation pioneer’s global network experts and regional research hubs.
So when it comes to finding the right people to work on a given problem, “Some will be here, some might be in Germany, some more might be in Shanghai, and then you figure out what is the right process by which you zero in on an answer or a solution,” Mr. Rice said.
It might sound like a contradiction, but the goal of all this is to try to establish a predictable formula for innovation. Inside three totally redesigned floors hundreds of feet above the ground near the top of a downtown Calgary office tower, GE is attempting to embed innovation directly into the architecture.
“When you say you want to innovate, what are the tools and analytics that help you get to a place of innovation? What does innovation, as a process, look like?” said Elyse Allan, CEO of GE’s Canadian division.
“This is really a centre where if you are [ Canadian Pacific] or WestJet you call your GE team and you take over the space and you might camp out for a week or two while we work on the issue with you.”
The public sector has attempted to curate the innovation process before. For decades, governments have established research centres and advanced institutions only to close them down a short time later.
“There has just been one centre after another that has been focused on the oil side from the government that has not worked,” said Dr. Uttandaraman Sundararaj, head of the chemical and petroleum engineering department at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering, who previously
What does innovation, as a process, look like?
worked in GE’s plastics division. “In terms of actually doing innovation, I think most of that is done at the university level now.”
Rather than viewing the shiny new home of about 130 privately employed scientists and engineers as competition for his own expertise, Mr. Sundararaj sees the centre as a focal point for future collaboration between industry and academia.
“Either we’ll have more people that we can exchange with scientifically or maybe even potentially get some funding opportunities,” he said. “It is going to be a positive for us overall.”
GE feels very much the same way. Many prominent academics were invited to attend Wednesday’s grand opening and management fully intends to leverage local talent.
“There will [ also] be a fair amount of competition” for the new centre, cautions Joseph Doucet, interim dean of the University of Alberta’s School of Business, adding countless consulting firms that often make similar promises to their clients and the internal innovation processes common to most major energy companies. “But I think what GE brings to the table is the benefit of their global research expertise.” While the centre itself is not designed to appeal to any one industry — and Mr. Rice referenced some development of home- based health care technology moving forward there — the Heavy Oil Centre for Excellence spans one of the centre’s three floors and is designed specifically to tackle the unique challenges faced by the dominant local industry.
“We’ve got experience solving challenges globally [ so] in my space, in the heavy oil space, maybe there is an application that we have where we can apply a product or solution from a different market into this one,” said James Cleland, the heavy oil centre’s general manager.
Evidence of his ability to make good on that promise can already be found across the oil sands of northern Alberta. Nearly four decades ago, GE developed thermal evaporation technology for use in desalination plants and the power generation industry.
Today, that same technology has been repurposed for use by oil sands producers using a production method with a much smaller environmental footprint than mining known as steam- assisted gravity drainage or SAG- D.
“Because the SAG- D producers have a lot of water coming up with the oil after they pump the steam underground, they need to be able to recycle this water and our technology really allows them to reach very high recycling rates,” Mr. Cleland said, adding the process allows producers to reuse about 95% of their water.
“There is a perfect example of taking a technology that existed somewhere else in the company that was being used for a different market, and we found an application for it here which has helped solve environmental and operational challenges for our clients.”
He can’t talk about most of his ongoing projects for obvious competitive reasons. However, he is happy to detail what he hopes GE’s latest initiative will ultimately achieve.
“Some of the toughest challenges we have today are around environmental issues and cost escalations,” Mr. Cleland said. “The oil sands would be rebranded as eco- friendly oil or something like that; basically to have changed the game.”
No doubt there are many here eager to have that conversation.