Submitted by Administrator on Wed, 10/06/2020 - 00:15
Michael Weinold, a visiting C-EENRG researcher from ETH Zürich who studies technology spillovers in solid-state lighting, has published an opinion piece on General Electric exit from lighting business on The Conversation.
General Electric has recently sold its lighting business after more than a century of breakthrough innovations that date back to Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb. In his article, Michael explores the sequence of events that led to an end-of-an-era to once the biggest company in the world and argues that GE was outcompeted by other companies that made an early bet on light-emitting diode (LED) technology. These firms invested in R&D to make LEDs cheap and energy-efficient, preparing LED lighting products for the mass market entrance after 2010 when energy efficiency regulations were introduced by the US and EU. General Electric did not invest in LED R&D at the same level as competitors in the US, EU and eventually China, and was not able to catch-up on them, losing its formerly dominant role on the lighting market as a result.
Read the full article on The Conversation.
