-- the superconducting magnet shell requires the accurate creation of 'nested doll' cryogenic containers, built to withstand magnetostatic forces in a highly regulated environment with defined safety requirements under catastrophic failure modes. Solving the design problem is equivalent to solving a huge set of nasty, coupled PDEs subject to loads of material constraints. This is directly analogous to aspects of jet engine design.
-- inside the bore of the magnet (but not in the cryostat) goes a device called the gradient set, whose job is to generate \partial B_z/ \partial_{xyz} as a function of time (that, very much indirectly, the radiographer specifies). This is a water cooled, resistive set of magnet coils with a defined frequency response curve, linearity requirements, etc. The current into them is generated by a set of three huge amplifiers, which have to actually take a signal delivered on a timebase of microseconds and volts and amplify it with negligible delay and deliver kA into a large inductor centimetres away from a patient. This is a formidable (power) electronic engineering challenge with huge parallels to various aspects of electrical engineering – e.g. managing (preventing) dielectric breakdown, thermal management, inverse solutions to Maxwell's equations in a quasistatic region (people use streamfunctions to do this well), etc.
-- the RF side of the system has to transmit kV and receive microvolts within microseconds into a definitively challenging electrodynamic environment with constraints on harmonics. Everything has to keep to a hard realtime constraint. The ADC must have a huge dynamic range and the problem is conducted massively in parallel. This is directly analogous to problems in telecommunications or RF design, but harder -- intermittent pulsed not continuous wave, and a hard requirement to accurately measure analogue voltages. Designing the RF coil ("probe" in NMR speak or ≈"antenna") is a further horrible (full-wave) EM design problem that even GE often subcontract out to one of about five specialist firms worldwide.
It's not a priori obvious to me that lots of competing companies would be better at creating stuff that requires the interaction of disciplines like this. Rather, I view the split up of GE and all of the woes of the article as evidence of a business mismanaged by MBAs. The defined benefit pensions should have been protected by law and overseen by an independent regulator - like my defined benefit pension that sits above my employer and shares risk among many different universities.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: it's almost as if the combination of supporting physics and engineering without particular attention to the ultimate "core competency" or "end market segment" lets creative, interdisciplinary ideas like this flourish.
It wasn't until the 2008 GFC crushed GE Capital that it all started to really come apart, many decades after Welch got started.
I ask because at one of the others that I am familiar with, there was also this aura - mystique - of broad field competence but in practice and internally, nobody talked to anybody (and management somehow loved getting their noses into everyone's attempts at communicating with anyone.) It was very difficult to even figure out who was working on what.
We often hear of synergies but there are clear ways to NOT get technical synergies. (While financial synergies did exist - until people fixated on "pure plays".)
At any rate again, in large groups like this, there is a conflict on patents. Patents are used as weapons against other large groups on one hand (equal to equal) and smaller wannabes on the other (swatting flies). The result is that day to day, there is little incentive to patent or publish anything. It's not a core objective. Now and then a promising product direction is identified and then real effort is put in papering it up. But that's only as a weapon against the others - certainly not for the advancement of mankind. The rest of the knowledge and experience dies with the brains that carry it (although occasionally they find the time to write a book.)
Finally, few "completed" technologies get abandoned outright, first they get spun off or sold to some other business. Even the patent stash - if there is one - is worth some money. What does get abandonned without any publication is mountains of smaller projects in engineering or research or manufacturing groups - which have other day to day concerns and are busy and have no issue with just shelving hundreds of smaller projects and turning attention to the next hundreds of smaller projects.
Do NOT count on patents to solve the problem of engineering and science waste.