PARADIGM PLUS

The future ain't what it used to be.

— YOGI BERRA

FOR GE, THE ICONIC GLOBAL industrial company founded by Thomas Edison, the Great Disruption began to emerge in late 2013. It came from the most unlikely of messengers: a young man working shoeless in front of twinned computer screens in a cramped room just outside of Jakarta, Indonesia. Arie Kurniawan had recently noticed on an engineering website that GE's aviation division was hosting an "Open Innovation Challenge" to redesign a critical component of an airplane. The competition sounded a bit wonky: The winner would create the best new design for a relatively simple-looking bracket. But this was no ordinary part. The bracket attached directly to an eight-thousand-pound jet engine and was critical in securing the engine to the wing. The part that GE was redesigning, one that had been in use for decades, was heavy and clunky but, as you would expect, incredibly strong and reliable.

It was late at night, and Arie had been working tirelessly on the project. His approach was not just to find improvements to this critical component, but to completely reimagine it. As dawn broke, Arie hit the send button, submitting his entry. He was satisfied with his efforts — as much as any engineer ever is — but he tried to keep his expectations realistic. In fact, he wondered if his submission would ever get more than a cursory glance from the veteran GE engineers on the selection committee.

A few months later, to Arie's complete surprise, General Electric chose his design over nearly a thousand other submissions. But the shock waves from his success spread far beyond his tiny room in Indonesia. First of all, it turned out that Arie had no experience whatsoever with industrial manufacturing — the design and production of large, highly durable machinery. In fact, his only formal design education had come a few years earlier in his provincial town, at a vocational high school with the slogan "Prepare faithful graduates who can compete in the global world." He had spent the last few years designing gloves and computer stands, not high-stress industrial equipment. But his lack of complex manufacturing experience didn't stop him from beating some very tough competition. One submission had come from a Swedish Ph.D. who worked for Saab and General Motors. Another was developed by a British stress engineer at Airbus, the world's largest producer of commercial aircraft.

But that's not all that was surprising about Arie's story. His novel design was enabled by new industrial 3D printing technology. Up until that point, every other engine bracket ever used — like many other of the hundreds of critical pieces that make up a jet — had been produced through conventional manufacturing. These techniques included pouring liquid metal into the hollow center of a mold, or bending and shaping molten ore. Yet the quirky-looking bracket Arie designed in his small office worked perfectly. Printed by General Electric with technology that is still in its early years, the bracket passed every one of the rigorous tests for durability, stress, and reliability.

And it weighed 83 percent less than the part it would replace.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, a GE executive named David Joyce walked down a hallway toward a 3D printer. The machine was a refrigerator-sized box accessed by a door that swings open from the side. Inside, lasers were meticulously fusing together metal powder into an industrial-strength object, "printing" it layer by layer. David had spent almost his entire career, more than three decades, working for GE's aviation division. During that time he had tirelessly manipulated engineering designs, chasing incremental improvements in productivity and efficiency. This is tedious, relentless work. Even successes can be measured in the hundredths of a percent.

But that was before 3D printing handed GE a whole new range of tools. Now, his engineers could design components with complicated geometries that were previously impossible to make. These printers can essentially build a physical version of anything that can be imagined on a computer. This includes a huge number of objects that would be impossible to create using any other manufacturing method. 3D printers, for example, can drill the proverbial "curved hole" in a metal block — or print objects that exactly replicate that effect. They can create a seamless hollow steel ball, or one that contains another empty steel ball, which contains another steel ball, and on and on.

Curved holes and spheres within spheres are cool, but they are basically the manufacturing equivalent of party tricks. David's team was manufacturing a sophisticated industrial component with real-world use — and huge implications. The 3D printer stopped, and David peered inside at GE's brand-new fuel-injection nozzle for a jet engine.

The first amazing thing about this new part is simply that it was created as one piece. The previous nozzle had twenty-one separate parts, each of which needed to be produced by parts suppliers, shipped to a central location, and then assembled. Second, it was not created on a noisy factory floor, but in a laboratory that could just as easily have been in Nigeria or on the fifth floor of a Manhattan apartment building.

Its improvements in functionality were also massive. The new fuel-injection system was five times stronger, five times more durable, and 25 percent lighter than the old part. And it increased fuel efficiency by an astonishing 15 percent!

Taken together, these innovations will result in fuel cost savings of over $1 million annually. For every single airplane that uses the new system.

Reports of these two separate events quickly spread around General Electric, all the way to the office of the CEO. Certainly no one expected these parts to have an immediate impact on the company's overall financials, but the implications of these two events were disarmingly clear:

* If a twenty-something with no training in industrial manufacturing could outdesign a leading multinational company stocked with top-flight engineers, what were the implications for the current global workforce?

* If these two critical parts could be redesigned with such massive improvements, what were the possibilities for the company's other tens of millions of parts?

* If twenty-one parts could be produced as one, what did this mean for the future of GE's long-standing parts producers?

* If this new...