Open innovation is the key to building new opportunities

Here at Samsung we have some of the smartest, hardest working people on the planet. But we don’t have them all! We recognize that technology innovation today is a team sport and we believe that open innovation is imperative for business today. We have created this site to expand and build opportunities for collaboration with our company. Exploiting an opportunity requires expertise, technologies and insight throughout the ecosystem.. We strongly believe that having an open basis for working with Samsung teams is essential to creating these opportunities. A multitude of options exist for collaboration models between Samsung and our partners and the purpose of our open innovation program is to include them all. Here are some examples (and this is by no means an inclusive list) of how we could work together:

1. Strategic alliances with technology partners to bring new business and innovation opportunities to prototype, pre-product and hopefully product together. This usually involves forming an agreement on the scope of alliance and non-disclosure of co-work. This type of collaboration often works best if both players have complementary technologies to get to market.
2. Technology licensing with potential technology partners. Technologies from partners are brought into Samsung on a development basis as part of open innovation and showcased around the company in prototypes and pre-products. If a technology is adopted in products, a product licensing agreement for the technology would then be created.
3. Samsung sponsorship of technology development. Most often this is sponsorship of university projects (although could include venture investments) to mature a technology that Samsung would subsequently pull into an R&D project inside the company. With its unique location in Silicon Valley, the US R&D Center at SISA can work directly with universities and facilitate collaboration with other Samsung groups.
4. Business and service relationships. Some times, mature technologies exist, but a synergy can be developed by leveraging each other’s strengths. Unlikely strategic alliances and licensing this type of collaboration does not need much joint development or licensing. Instead if forms a mutual alignment of existing technologies of Samsung and our partners.
5. Try it out. These pages over time will contain samples, demonstrations, code bases from Samsung projects. You will be able to download and experiment with our prototypes. We would love to get your feedback and your ideas for improving them.
6. Come be an intern with us. We have a very strong intern program. We recognize that fresh talent and a different pair of eyes can yield insights that are sometimes right under our nose. And of course we love to get to know bright young researchers that might subsequently decide to join our team.

Who do we work with? We work with large companies, small companies, universities, research institutes as well as individuals. Everyone is invited!

First Steps

The best way to get started is to review some of the open innovations under the projects tab. If a collaboration opportunity pops out at you, please follow up with the relevant project in the contact us field. A member of the team will contact you to discuss the type of collaboration, arrange demonstrations and meetings to follow up.

If you have ideas for collaboration, but don’t see a related project on the site currently, don’t be disappointed. Samsung is a very large company with a huge number of projects innovating in a vast number of areas. Only a very small fraction of these projects are described here. Chances are there is someone in our company that will want to talk to you. So please feel free to contact us with your ideas for collaboration. We have a group here in San Jose whose mission is connecting opportunities and innovations with the rest of the company. They will work with you to setup either a direct collaboration or bring internal projects to this site so that you can work with them in an open environment.

—The Open Innovation Team