Sean Carney leads Design and Consulting at Philips, ensuring customer need informs the innovation practice and design thinking flows through business and clinical recommendations. The concurrency of these roles is enabled by having a shared ambition to transform healthcare among the 500+ in-house designers, architects and consultants and their collective design thinking approach. This approach leads to co-created, seamless innovations that help deliver on the Quadruple Aim; enhancing the patient experience, improving health outcomes, lowering the cost of care, and improving the work life of care providers.

His team’s success in positively impacting the lives of users, clinicians and patients around the world, is widely recognized with 141 top design awards won by Philips last year.

This is not the first award-winning team Sean has led. Across more than 25 years, at global players including iittala, Assa Abloy, Hewlett-Packard and Electrolux, Sean has been able to hone and develop his innate curiosity for the craft of design while adding invaluable expertise in business and management. 

Throughout his career, the customer and their unmet needs has always been the focal point for designing and developing solutions. This was true at Electrolux where Sean pioneered a user-centred approach to brand design that goes well-beyond performance and functionality. This is the essence of the question he asks of his team each and every day at Philips: does this improve the lives of consumers and medical professionals and deliver on the quadruple aim?