Chuck Swoboda, formerly CEO of Cree, provides his perspective on GE’s sale of its lighting business in a recent contribution to FORBES.
He writes:
The success of LED technology and the lighting companies’ eventual exit from the industry they created originated from an invention initially developed within their own labs. In 1962, GE scientist Nick Holonyak, Jr. demonstrated the world’s first visible LED. At the time, scientists at GE were scrambling to develop new semiconductor light sources. When Holonyak suggested using a mixture of gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide to make an LED, his colleagues argued that it would never work. He was undeterred and eventually proved them wrong. His work helped advance technology that would continue to evolve over the next 50 years – eventually pushing GE and the other lighting companies out of the business.
The article provides an interesting insider’s view on the end of an era and the start of the next.
Click here to check it out.
