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CUE 2005

Scott Donnelly, right, joins Juan Carlos Alvarez of the GE Global Research diesel team in front of the division's locomotive-scale, single-cylinder engine. The engine laboratory enables the diesel team to quantify the impact of new combustion technologies to simultaneously reduce emissions and improve fuel economy of GE's locomotive products.

CU Alumnus Scott Donnelly—GE’s ‘Imagination at Work’

A typical day for Scott Donnelly (ElCompEngr’84) starts at 5:30 a.m. As senior vice president of GE Global Research, he rises early to exercise and arrive at the office about 7. His daily schedule may include a project review with a technical team, work on personnel and leadership development, or a visit with a GE customer to learn more about a particular market.

With 11 distinct business units ranging from energy to healthcare to transportation, GE is a $134 billion industrial and financial powerhouse and No. 2 on Fortune magazine’s list of “America’s Most Admired Companies.” Donnelly’s role is central to the company’s success.

About half his time is spent on the road between GE Global Research headquarters in Niskayuna, New York, and its other research centers in Munich, Shanghai, and Bangalore, India.

It seems like a hectic schedule for a 43-year-old father of three children, yet somehow Donnelly still fits in time to coach his son’s hockey team.

The creativity and diversity of GE research and technologies is what makes the job fun and exciting, he says.

“The best part of my job is the opportunity to work with a bunch of incredibly creative people in a broad range of disciplines and a broad range of technical applications,” says Donnelly. “The ideas that come out of these teams are fascinating.”

Promoted about 5 years ago from GE’s Medical Systems division where he was vice president of global technology operations, Donnelly says he is equally comfortable working with research teams in one technology application as another.

He began his career in the aerospace and semiconductor industries as a design engineer developing advanced computer architecture for special purpose processors and systems. He joined GE Aerospace in Syracuse, New York, in 1989, advanced into management, and then transferred over to GE Industrial Systems in 1995.

Now, Donnelly heads the company’s long-range research activities, which employ 2,500 scientists and engineers at four multi-disciplinary facilities, researching emerging technologies such as biotechnology, sustainable energy, and nanotechnology. Company leaders consider the Global Research division to be the cornerstone of GE technology, developing breakthrough innovations in areas such as medical imaging, energy generation technology, jet engines, and lighting. Long-range research accounts for 15 percent of GE’s total R&D budget, or more than $400 million per year, according to Donnelly.

This desk was used by Thomas Edison in the office of the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City prior to the formation of the General Electric Company in 1892.

Although GE’s growth in the last few decades was driven largely by its financial services division and NBC-TV network, Global Research has become a renewed focus under the leadership of CEO Jeffrey Immelt with a $100 million investment to upgrade the Niskayuna research center in upstate New York.

“Our ability to transfer core technologies from one business to another—a breakthrough in imaging helps not only healthcare but also our security and inspections businesses—is a real competitive advantage,” Donnelly says. “Our passion is innovation; our focus is bringing technology to the marketplace where it can change peoples’ lives.”

Invention and innovation also are the company’s heritage, which dates back to 1892, when co-founder Thomas Edison merged his Edison General Electric Company with the Thomson-Houston Company to form GE. Thomas Edison’s desk sits prominently in the entrance of the Niskayuna research center as a reminder of that heritage.

“Product differentiation is hugely important in our marketplaces,” Donnelly explains. “If you have a better product, chances are you will sell it more and be more profitable. So whatever it takes to drive product differentiation, whether in health care, transportation or energy, is what we do.”

Often, that means making a decade-long investment in a technology, which may or may not pan out.

“We’re a company that’s been around for a long time, and we can look back at a certain development and understand what it took to get it to the marketplace. We know we have to make the investment,” Donnelly says. “It’s OK if we take a chance and it doesn’t work, but if it works and it doesn’t end up in a product, that’s when we’ve failed.”

Scott Donnelly addresses attendees at GE’s annual leadership meeting in Orlando, Florida.

The company starts by hiring people who get their satisfaction from delivering something that ends up in a product or service. GE research teams focus on what’s going on in a particular market, what they expect customer needs to be 10 to 15 years down the road, and what they could do that would be so dramatically different that it would change the way an industry operates.

“We take some pretty smart people and give them the freedom, the latitude to work on different approaches,” Donnelly says. “We try to expose our researchers to a lot of market information, and we have free-form discussions about the future of different markets.”

With all the talk about marketing, you might think Donnelly picked up a business degree somewhere along the road in his career. Not so. Instead, Donnelly says he has been adaptable and learned along the way. “GE has been good for me,” he says.

So was CU, he adds: “The caliber of the people in the engineering school was excellent. The interactions, the technical challenges, the lab projects all taught me a lot about how to work with people.”

Donnelly now serves on the CU Engineering Advisory Council to help the college be at the forefront of training the next generation of engineering leaders.