What the business environment in the year 2040 will look like is a question of great importance for today's companies. Whether technologies and business models stay the same or whether they will radically change has a great influence on how companies will have to conduct their business in the future. The following paper will focus on a scenario where business is mainly concentrated in large specialized cosmopolitan centres in which specific industries or services are localized. The impact of such a scenario on today's companies will be explored through the perspective of Philips. Philips is a largely diversified multinational firm which was founded in the Netherlands. In order to specifically investigate the positioning of Philips in a specialized cosmopolitan centre, this paper will focus on the healthcare division of Philips and more specifically, on the research on nanotechnology. Since, in this scenario, nanotechnology is expected to be the new general purpose technology in 2040, Philips has decided to focus the R&D of their healthcare division on the development of new drugs that will make use of this new technology. The specific product that Philips will be focusing on is carbon nanotubes. These carbon nanotubes are drug delivery vehicles that can target a disease or infection in the body and deliver the medicine to the problem area without affecting the rest of the body. It is a technology that will radically change the way in which medicine is practiced and because of this, Philips is aiming to develop this technology within their company in the future. .
The cosmopolitan centre that Philips will be located in in 2040 will be in the Netherlands. The population density and the high level of education in the Netherlands will lead to the formation of a specialized cluster in the future. The cluster will start out in the city where Phillips was founded, Eindhoven. It is a city with a large technological knowledge base and excellent universities.