Samsung Electronics is taking the lead in fostering young talent through its in-house venture program ‘Creative Lab(C-Lab)’ and ‘Samsung SW Academy for Youth(SSAFY),’ a software education for college students. Samsung Electronics’ C-Lab is an in-house venture program introduced by Samsung Electronics in 2012 to spread its creative organizational culture. Samsung Electronics explained that it is providing executives and employees with creative talents and passion opportunities to implement ideas in person.
Through C-Lab, Samsung Electronics is exploring new business areas that can become future growth engines, while encouraging executives and employees to experience a startup-style research culture. The company expects the spread of creative organizational culture, which allows a free flow of ideas and eventually helps to venture out in the field after the project is finished. Executives and employees, who participate in the C-Lab task can work like startups in an independent workplace for one year away from the current business. In addition, with the guarantee of maximum autonomy, task operations such as team formation, budget utilization, and schedule management can be operated autonomously within the team. “C-Lab does not hold us responsible for failure, so we can challenge our high goals more boldly,” Samsung said. “This is Samsung Electronics’ new attempt to encourage a culture that challenges us without fear of failure.”
It is spreading a culture in which executives and employees can challenge startups with their own ideas as they can be re-entered if they wish to do so within five years after the spin-off. Executives and employees submit over 1,000 ideas every year under the theme of various fields, including Artificial Intelligence, self-driving and social contribution. As of the end of last year, 228 tasks were carried out and 918 executives and employees participated. In addition, 78 tasks were used in-house and 36 were spun off as startups.
In October 2018, Samsung Electronics announced that it will establish ‘C-Lab Outside’, which is a program to foster competitive prospective startups, as one of its measures to revitalize the economy and create jobs. It plans to nurture 500 projects over the next five years, including 200 in-house C-Lab projects (C-Lab Inside), and 300 outside startups. Through this, it will contribute to creating an ecosystem of young startups so young people can venture to start their own businesses.
In addition, Samsung Electronics has prepared ‘SSAFY (Samsung SW Academy for Youth’) to nurture software experts and help solve youth unemployment problems with support from the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Last year, Samsung selected 500 students, including 250 from Seoul campus, and plans to provide software education to 10,000 people over the next five years. Samsung Electronics has set aside 499.6 billion won (about US$499 million) for this.
