Maarten Buijs is an innovation expert on a break.

Opinion

Technology forecasting

Reading time: 3 minutes

I recently bought a new TV for our living room. I was very pleased to be able to buy an affordable OLED television from Philips. Although the TV is manufactured by TP Vision, I assume that some or much of the technology inside originated from Philips. When I worked at Philips Research (Natlab), organic LEDs were hot and we started working on organic LED technology for displays, having missed the right boat for LCD and having failed with proprietary flat-panel technology based on electron hopping.

At the Natlab in Eindhoven, we worked on the polymer variant of OLEDs. I was heading the department responsible for the ink-jetting science and polymer OLED technology. Philips Research in Aachen worked on small-molecule OLED. I seem to remember that that was to our dismay because our technology assessment indicated polyLED to be superior. We didn’t believe in the concept of spending money on competing technology development. To my recollection, Aachen got away with it because their technology wasn’t for television but for lighting, which was their turf. Now we see that small-molecule OLED is the technology of choice for TV.

Another invention of that time was the CD-I, the interactive CD that Philips brought to the market when I started working there. Even though it was expensive, I felt compelled to buy it as an eager young Philips employee. I never regretted that: it was a perfect interactive experience at a time when game computers had terrible graphics and PCs still worked with command lines. My small children loved it and were still fondly reminiscing of it years later when Nintendo and other game consoles dominated.

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