After I completed my education in university as electrical engineer, I started to work, in 1986, at Philips Electronics as quality engineer in product development. At that moment the development of products was, even in a large and multinational company like Philips, very much a company-internal affair. Products were developed in one location, and manufactured in one or two locations (all called Philips) based on technology and parts/materials coming from a stable and well-established supplier base, in which many companies were called Philips as well. Although, from an economic perspective one can doubt whether this approach was efficient it had the advantage that there was easy and direct communication based upon a large and stable common knowledge and experience base.
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