Philips: How a Lightbulb Company's Research Lab Turned It Into a Health Technology Brand

In 1923, Albert Einstein travelled to Eindhoven to give a lecture, not at a university, but at a laboratory belonging to a company that made light bulbs. That detail says almost everything about how Philips became Philips.

A Company That Chose to Invent

Philips was founded in 1891 in Eindhoven by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, with a plan to make cost-effective, reliable incandescent bulbs. The company's early years were about manufacturing. But in 1914, a decision by Gerard and his brother Anton changed its character: they opened a physics laboratory, known as the NatLab.

The context mattered. After patent legislation was introduced in the Netherlands, Philips could no longer freely copy the inventions of others; it had to create its own. The company's research laboratory was designed around that need, with a first mission of building a patent portfolio on genuinely new inventions. Philips' own history describes the lab as aspiring to the highest standards of research, taking on visionary projects such as investigating emerging lighting technologies.

The Physicist Who Built a Culture

The man chosen to lead it was Dr. Gilles Holst, a Dutch physicist who had worked in Leiden and had studied superconductivity. He became the NatLab's first true researcher and director, and he left a lasting imprint on how Philips thought about research. Holst encouraged scientists to publish, surrounded himself with excellent colleagues, and invited researchers from around the world, creating an academic atmosphere inside an industrial company. The NatLab was modelled on General Electric's laboratory in the United States, and within a few years it had earned a reputation for both fundamental and applied research.

That culture attracted serious names. One of its researchers, the German physicist Gustav Ludwig Hertz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925, and Einstein's 1923 lecture put the lab on the international science map. Holst himself co-invented the pentode with a colleague in 1926 and invented the low-pressure sodium lamp in 1932. By 1975, the NatLab employed around 2,000 people, including some 600 researchers with university degrees.

From Lamps to X-Rays to MRI

What began as a lighting company's lab gradually opened another door. During the First World War, Philips was approached by users of X-ray equipment who wanted their broken tubes repaired, and the NatLab's work on X-ray tubes ultimately marked the origin of Philips' involvement in health technology. By 1918, the company was making medical X-ray tubes.

Over the decades, the lab's research built a strong patent position in magnetic materials, which led to the compact audio cassette in 1963 and, later, to magnetic resonance imaging. Its post-war masterpieces also included the Plumbicon television tube, contributions to integrated circuits, and the compact disc, co-developed with Sony. The same lab, in other words, produced both the things people played music on and the machines that look inside the human body.

Letting Go of the Light

The strategic consequences arrived slowly, then all at once. In 2013, Philips dropped "Electronics" from its name, leaving behind its identity as a broad technology group. In 2016, it floated its lighting business, the very business that had built the company, as a separate company, Philips Lighting, later renamed Signify. What remained was a company focused on health technology, with a stated purpose of improving people's health and well-being through meaningful innovation. That identity still carries research credentials: in 2024, Philips was recognised as a Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovator for the 11th consecutive year, and in 2023 it ranked among the top medical technology patent applicants at the European Patent Office.

A Hard Test of the New Promise

A brand built on health is judged by health outcomes, and Philips' recent history shows how demanding that is. On June 14, 2021, its subsidiary Philips Respironics issued a voluntary recall of certain sleep and respiratory care devices, including CPAP, BiPAP, and ventilator products, over potential health risks from a polyester-based polyurethane sound abatement foam used in them. The consequences were serious. In April 2024, a court entered a consent decree placing Philips Respironics under long-term quality-system oversight, and the company agreed to a $1.1 billion settlement of US personal injury claims, without admitting fault or liability. It also reached a €540 million agreement with insurers to cover recall-related product liability claims. In 2023, Exor, the Agnelli family's investment firm, became a long-term minority investor in Philips, and increased its stake in 2024.

The Marketing Strategy: Let the Laboratory Be the Brand

What makes Philips distinctive isn't a single advertising campaign. It's that research itself functioned as the brand's proof. For more than a century, Philips has marketed itself through credibility earned in the lab: publishing scientific work, building a patent portfolio, hosting world-class scientists, and co-developing industry-defining formats with partners like Sony. Customers and clinicians trusted the name because the science behind it was visible.

The second element is consolidation of identity around a single purpose. By shedding consumer-electronics breadth and the lighting business, Philips gave itself a narrower, clearer promise in healthcare, one that its research heritage, from X-ray tubes to MRI, could credibly support.

The Respironics recall shows the other side of that strategy. When a brand's promise is health, quality failures cut to the heart of the promise, and rebuilding trust becomes the most important marketing task of all.

The Lab That Became the Brand

Philips' story is, at its core, a story about a company that followed its research wherever it led, even when that meant changing what the company was. From a bulb factory that built a physics laboratory to a health technology company that sold the lighting business which started it, Philips shows that sometimes a brand's most valuable asset isn't a product, but a way of thinking.