Samsung’s strategic incubation initiative: Exploring creative possibilities to the infinity and beyond
- ByStartupStory | July 4, 2022
When Pankaj Agarwal joined Samsung back in 2004, straight after completing his engineering from IIT Kanpur, the only thing he knew about the company was that his family owned a Samsung TV. Over the last 18 years, Agarwal has worked in South Korea, got sponsored to complete his MBA, had a stint in the company’s marketing team and got an opportunity to turn an innovative idea into a startup which shall help in reducing the student dropout rates in the government schools all over the country.
This last bit was possible due to an initiative Samsung launched in 2012 called C-Lab or Creative Lab, which is an in-house idea incubation programme that enables employees to develop their creative ideas into meaningful offerings. The purpose of this initiative was to expand the creative culture within the company by discovering and implementing innovative ideas.
Once an employee joins C-Lab, they work as an actual startup for one year inside the company. At the C-Lab fair held every November, employees can showcase their progress and receive feedback. C-Lab organized different planning and orientation sessions, invited experts and past C-Lab CEOs to share their experiences and trained the employees to launch their ideas into the main market.
In 2017, Agarwal’s idea got spun off as his startup, TagHive, that developed a product called ‘Class Saathi’ which focused the on students and their learning outcomes. Over the past 10 years, over 1,507 employees have participated in 365 C-Lab projects, and of these, 128 projects have been transferred to in-house Samsung divisions. Samsung recently launched its global citizenship programme, Solve for Tomorrow in India, which is a competition for India’s youth to solve real-world problems.
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