GE Reports | Your source for what's happening at GE.

Making GE an “industrial company first” and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they’re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year’s Annual Report. “In 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,” writes GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. “We have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.” One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare’s Al Lojewski explains in the video below, which is part of GE’s online Annual Report: “We really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.”

Today GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt spoke at the United States Military Academy at West Point, focusing on the need for leaders who have the courage to change themselves and others if the country is to realize a better economic future after the seismic changes of the last year. And it’s precisely West Point’s values of “Duty, Honor, and Country” and its commitment to integrity, performance and change that “every person in the United States — from business and from government — can learn from,” he said.