In the unstable economic environment of the last few years, many companies have mortgaged their future by pulling back on innovation and investment in R&D. GE seems to see the economic challenges as an opportunity. As a bellwether of the global economy, it exudes optimism by transforming itself into a hub of innovation.  The marketing of innovation initiatives are led by a progressive, forward-thinking executive, Beth Comstock. In 2003, she was named GE’s first Chief Marketing officer in  more than 20 years, introducing the “Ecomagination” platform, and the “Imagination At Work” brand campaign. Beth served as President of Integrated Media at NBC Universal where she oversaw ad sales, marketing and research, and led the company’s digital media development and distribution, including the formation of hulu.com. In addition to her responsibilities at GE she is also a member of Nike’s Board of Directors and Trustee president of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  You have been outspoken saying that you see your role as CMO in terms of innovation. Why is that?  GE is a technology company, but technology alone doesn’t tell the full story. We think that there’s a lot more room to connect innovation with the market, and that there are different ways of taking products and services to market. So, for us it’s been a big push to be technology-led as well as market-led. Marketing makes us more ambidextrous in terms of innovation by connecting the technology to needs, and to trends in the marketplace and make us more tethered to the market. We define marketing as a combination of value and innovation, and that means that we had to look at marketers as innovators.  This is not a traditional definition of marketers, especially in a technology company. How did you get around it?  It required a bit of a sense of instigation. You have to be able to say to the engineers, “this is great technology, but there’s no market for it”; or “it has too many features”; or, “it’s targeted to the wrong user base”. An instigator is the one who may be agitating for a different way of doing things, seeing a different path forward, disrupting the status quo.  How do you identify marketing instigators?  We did a study a couple of years ago to find out what is the DNA of a good marketer is, somebody that can deliver profitable growth, and we found that there were four characteristics: instigating being one; implementation is another, since they need to get things done; they have to be able to integrate different functions like sales, product, and operations, and the forth is marketers need to be innovators. I kind of think that instigating and innovation goes together, and implementing and integrating go together. It’s hard to find people who have all four characteristics, so we tend to develop teams that combine all these traits.
Innovation has to be a group sport generally speaking, but not all the time and at each stage