GE Careers Blog.

GE calls it the “industrial Internet.” It’s about giving machines such as power plant turbines, jet engines, and manufacturing equipment an online connection so they can constantly send back performance information, which is analyzed to automatically alert technicians when there’s a problem. GE predicts a multibillion-dollar-a-year business selling software to support this industrial Internet, a business it projects can grow at double-digit rates through 2015. GE is staking $1 billion on this idea with a new global software center in Silicon Valley, where up to 400 people will build and market software to serve the industrial Internet.

At first blush, Comstock doesn’t have an eclectic career path–she’s spent more than two decades within GE’s various divisions. But that hasn’t limited her embrace of flux. While she can dress and act the part of a quintessential corporate soldier, she’s also got a sweet spot for creative types who can bring her fresh thinking–and can spur GE forward. She’s brought in folks like Benjamin Palmer, the groovy CEO of edgy ad firm Barbarian Group, to help inject new ideas and processes into GE’s marketing apparatus. “We’re creating digital challenge teams,” she explains. She’s also trolling among cleantech and health startups, pointing to Luke Fishback at home-energy service PlotWatt as an example. “We’re doing a lot more work with entrepreneurs,” Comstock says. “It’s part of our internal growth strategy. It creates tension. It makes people’s jobs frustrating. But it’s also energizing.”

GE recently released its second annual Global Innovation Barometer, a survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. and foreign business executives on innovation. The report identified innovation as “inextricably linked” with economic growth and as the primary driver behind job creation and the rising quality of life.

Executives at GE are bracing for a new future. The challenge they face is the same one staring down wide swaths of corporate America, not to mention government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived: These organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult. We are finely tuned at taking a successful idea or product and replicating it on a large scale. But inside these legacy institutions, changing direction is rough. From classrooms arranged in rows of seats to tenured professors, from the assembly line to the way we promote executives, we have been trained to expect an orderly life. Yet the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap. This is what Comstock and Peters are battling.

With the beginning of a new year and it’s a great time to peer into the future. At GE, this does not require tea leaves. Some of the technologies that will help shape the world already exist in the company’s research labs. Take a look at manufacturing. Sometimes, the disruptive innovation is not what is being made but how. For more than a century, people made complex goods such as engine parts, turbine blades, and precise sprocket wheels by machining and taking away material to obtain the finished product. However, a new approach called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, eliminates most of that laborious process.