Frans van Houten

Healthcare continues to move outside the hospital and into our homes and everyday lives. With leading doctors and psychologists, for example, we've developed personal health programs designed around patients to catalyze sustainable behavioural change.

Great companies need to reinvent themselves. We can do that: we can stay relevant, we can grow, and we can stay successful. It takes courage, but it's a path we've been preparing for carefully.

At the core, Philips is an innovation company. And for innovation to work, you need to look for the unmet needs.

Even though we live in a fast-changing world with short term-ism all around, it requires years of determination to transform a company and structurally reap the rewards. Innovation companies need to set their sights on solving unmet needs - but this approach requires focus and long-term tenacity.

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.

I came back to Philips and quickly realised that the TV business had a major performance issue and some structural challenges. Rather than try to tweak it and sit things out, we said we had to go for a structural solution.

Government should seek more strategic approaches to developing dynamic, resilient infrastructure. Business must be more creative in offering financing solutions as partners with government, and people must support sustainable innovation as a public policy priority.

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.

It is vital that a company's culture shows a willingness to invest in employee wellbeing with no stigma or penalty attached to prioritising good health.

We typically sell a catheter lab to a hospital, and it sits there for the next 10 years, and we don't visit the cardiologist on a daily basis. Volcano have a disposable business. They are in the cath lab on a daily basis.

Healthy people are not very motivated to manage their health. They just don't care.

A siloed approach between suppliers doesn't really help hospitals well enough.