In 2011, the global population stood at under seven billion (just!). The world was slowly recovering from the financial crisis of a couple of years before and, while the Arab Spring was in full flow, there was yet no sign of the refugee crisis – nor various political upheavals – to come.
Back then, I was freshly appointed at the helm of Royal Philips. Over an era of more than a hundred years, Philips had built a succession of large, diverse businesses with varying missions and dynamics. My biggest concern at the time was that Philips would stay relevant.
As is usual for chief executives in these situations, I got together with my leadership team and we took a long, hard look at our core strengths and at the outside world. What was clear was that every industry was being transformed – quickly and relentlessly – by fierce disruptive innovation, driven by digitization, connectivity, and new business models.
Meantime, global leaders gathered to tackle grand challenges and, from their collective discussions, were borne the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Among these, three – ensuring healthy lives; responsible consumption and production and revitalizing the global partnership for sustainable development – were areas where we knew Philips could make a great and lasting contribution.
We knew we could put the company on the right side of history by decisive transformative action and by redefining our purpose to improving people's lives through innovation. We determined to become a focused health technology company that would serve customers right across the health continuum – from healthy living and prevention, through effective diagnosis and treatment, to home care – where the cycle to healthy living could be restored again.
We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.
We divested our landmark consumer electronics businesses and, in 2016, listed the lighting business, upon which the company had been founded, on the Amsterdam Euronext. These companies had deep roots: now we were to give them wings, so they could exist as independent organizations, focused on better responding to the markets they served.
Today, our 17 billion euro ($18.3 billion) business is almost exclusively in the area of health technology. We've acquired companies in areas as diverse as healthcare consulting, image-guided therapy and digital pathology as we build upon strong positions in hospital and home. We've stepped up R&D investments significantly to almost 10 percent of sales. More importantly, we've set ourselves a "moonshot" – to improve 3 billion lives a year by 2025 through meaningful innovation.