Philips healthcare
Sector
electronics
Philips sells Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to healthcare providers. Target customer segments include: university research hospitals; general public hospitals; private hospitals; and specialist private imaging centres.
Challenges
Customers need to ensure they have the right capabilities to deliver desired outcomes, at the right cost, over a product lifetime that can span 10 years or more. Additionally, this is against a backdrop of tightening healthcare budgets, structural changes in the industry, and technological change.
Innovations
A key innovation has been to ensure that healthcare providers will be able to maximise value from the installed base of MRI assets for as long as possible. Philips’ new business model has two aspects:
- During the initial years of the product lifetime: Services that optimise and enhance the value of the equipment through ongoing software and hardware updates.
- In the latter phase of the product lifetime: Extending the lifetime and value of MRI assets either through a full on-site overhaul; or trade-in for new MRI (with the traded-in machine being refurbished, upgraded, and re-sold).
“It is vital to shift our mind-set and culture towards focusing on our installed base, not just selling new. This is a winning formula when combined with customers wanting to get more out of their equipment.”
Key enablers
- Ensuring products are forward-compatible and upgradeable;
- Ensuring new updates and upgrades are backward-compatible and applicable to older models
- A significant shift in mindset with regards to customer relationship management and sales, supported through change management, target-setting and incentive systems.
“We now need to start thinking about the hardware architecture and platform design. For example, modularisation, re-using components across hardware models and generations..”
MATERIAL FLOWs

Circular Economy Business Models

Key OUTCOMEs
In 2017, 8% of ZARA’s sales worldwide were from the Join Life Sustainable collection. Some remarkable figures pertain to the use of more sustainable fibres:
- 36,7 million 100% organic cotton items to market (5th world consumer of organic cotton by volume)
- 318% more organic cotton by weight in products
- 100% of the water and almost all chemicals recycled in the production of TENCEL™ Lyocell.