In late 2013, Royal Philips was roughly two years into a daunting transformation. Following years of declining financial performance, CEO Frans van Houten aimed to turn the Dutch icon into a “high-performing company” by 2017. Over its 120-year history, Philips had developed a highly diversified portfolio of innovative products and services with a broad geographic reach, granting individual units substantial freedom in how they operated. Now, Philips was looking for a way to create value from its culture of technology-based innovation and the potential to serve many local markets in diverse businesses; but at the same time it wanted to leverage its global scale and scope by finding commonalities across the group. To do so, Philips announced the Accelerate! transformation program in 2011, including a fundamental makeover of Philips’ approach to products and processes, how people worked together, as well as of the overall IT landscape.
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