They light up our homes, entertain us with flat-screen televisions and depilate our bodies with shavers. Their medical scanners reveal what's going wrong in the deepest recesses of our bodies, but that isn't enough for the people at Philips. They want to intervene in our intimate relationships.

For Sheila Struyck, that means finding out what's happening in our bedrooms. She is vice-president of market-driven innovation for the Dutch electronics company and next week her team will watch nervously as the firm's most controversial innovation is launched in Britain.

Philips calls it an intimate massager - vibrator to the rest of us. Its appearance - non-phallic - is designed to be non-threatening. “We deliberately didn't make it that explicit. It's important that this should be available at a point of sale where you would buy a gift. This is one of the signals that it is OK.”

The initial signal that it was OK was secured from the Philips boardroom at an early stage. It wasn't easy, Ms Struyck admits, and the approval was conditional. “They said you can go ahead if you have a unique proposition that addresses end-user needs in a way that only Philips can.”

In other words, it must be poles apart from the smutty products sold by rivals and provide the anchor that would help Ms Struyck in her wider task: create a new business in “relationship care”.

Four years ago the Dutch company reinvented itself in an effort to shed the worthy image of a company run by engineers making better mousetraps. The new Philips was to be market-driven with three legs: healthcare, including the hi-tech scanners, lighting and consumer lifestyle.

The Intimate Massager fits into the last category and it emerged from the work of a Philips incubator - research teams that operate as venture capitalists within the company, brainstorming new product ideas and designs that must then be “sold” as commercial prospects to business units that bring the new gizmo to market.

“It's market driven innovation. It doesn't start with making clever things,” Ms Struyck said. “It's about when you buy it, where you buy it, how do you package it and how do you bring it home.”

Dutch-born Ms Struyck, 41, is a bit coy about who came up with the proposal, saying that it emerged from market research. It's tempting to imagine the Philips team, surrounded by stacks of statistics, brainstorming.

“How do we take this lifestyle thing further? We do food mixers, toothbrushes and shavers but how do we get closer to people with another electronic thing that spins and vibrates?”

“Hang on, did you say vibrates?”

This is a far cry from the old world of men and women in white coats tinkering with transistors and circuit boards. It's more about the manipulation of a brand and it's in Ms Struyck's blood. Before joining Philips, she set up an advertising agency and before that worked for seven years at Procter & Gamble, the world's premier boot camp for marketing professionals.

The key question, Ms Struyck says, is what the massager will do for the brand. Her team thinks it will give Philips a less conservative, more sensitive and more feminine image. “The name Philips will tell people this is something to be proud of.”

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