May 9--Southeastern Wisconsin has a much better shot at pulling talent out of the wealth of resources at GE Healthcare than technology, a panel of current and former GE executives said Thursday at a meeting of the Wisconsin Innovation Network in Brookfield.

With just less than 7,000 employees in southeastern Wisconsin and one of the most prolific patent-generating machines in the state, many look to GE Healthcare as a potentially strong economic development ally.

GE hasn't historically filled that role, however, because of its research and development centers in far-flung places such as China, Germany and India, said Robert S. Pothier, president and CEO of PointOne Systems LLC in Wauwatosa.

Much of that R&D comes through Milwaukee, but GE tends to think of it as global, not local, Pothier said.

"That's changing as people go into local businesses, then hook up with colleagues at GE," he said.

A number of former executives have left GE Healthcare in the past few years to run Wisconsin-based high-tech companies. They range from Pothier to Kevin Conroy, president and CEO of Madison-based Third Wave Technologies Inc., to Frederick A. Robertson, TomoTherapy Inc.'s CEO.

Conroy and Pothier were on a panel at the lunch with Bill Berezowitz, GE Healthcare's vice president and general manager of imaging subsystems.

Berezowitz said GE Healthcare has forged an intellectual property agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that could foster more collaboration, and it is working on establishing one with Marquette University. Reaching a similar agreement with the area's biggest research institution, the Medical College of Wisconsin, is "in my thought process," he said.

"I'd like to see a blanket agreement between GE and the Medical College, UW-Milwaukee and Marquette," Berezowitz said.

GE Healthcare may never be the kind of economic spur that a company such as Medtronics Inc. was in spinning out technology that helped build the medical equipment industry in Minneapolis, Conroy said. That's because GE Healthcare's business tends to be focused around bigger equipment, whose intellectual property doesn't transfer as readily into spin-off commercial ventures, he said.

But there likely will be a healthier transfer of people into the state's emerging businesses because of the networks that are being created by Conroy and others who've left GE, he said. GE Healthcare is known as a breeding ground for top executives who are well-trained in process management, said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, which organized the event.

To recruit Third Wave employees, many times, "the first place we'll look is GE -- and GE doesn't get too frustrated because of their deep bench," Conroy said.

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