Samsung introduced its Creative Lab (C-Lab) innovation program earlier this year, it enables the company's employees to develop their own business ideas. It has showcased nearly a dozen C-Lab projects up till now and has even launched five projects as proper companies. Samsung is now providing us with a closer look by taking us on a virtual tour of the C-Lab
The Creative Lab was set up to allow Samsung employees to work on their own business ideas and to give them the time and resources they need to develop that idea into a production. The only pre-requisite for a C-Lab project is that it has to be genuinely innovative, it doesn't matter if the idea does not fit within an existing area of business for Samsung, the company promises its employees full support to develop that idea into a new product or service. Employees are allowed to dedicate themselves to their projects 100 percent as Samsung allows them to take between six months and a full year away from their usual jobs to spend it working on their projects.
Samsung says that it created the C-Lab back in 2012 based on the experiences the company's management had in Silicon Valley. The management saw that the entire business environment was changing and that the startup scene was particularly doing well because they were not held back by the intricacies of a global conglomerate. That's what made it decide to launch C-Lab and also make some changes in the way it conducts business to become more of a startup instead of a boring corporate giant. Hierarchical systems do not govern C-Lab projects, each team has a leader and project members and that's it. This enables everyone to get their hands dirty so to speak and work together on projects to meet shared goals. C-Lab workers are also told that failure isn't a bad thing and that it's a part of the exploration process that some of the most innovative companies on the planet go through.
Any Samsung employee can suggest an idea for a C-Lab project which is then screened based on how innovative, specific, and marketable they are. In the voting stage, voters decide which projects should move to the next stage. The projects then go through a final review by experts before the final presentation where a selected audience plays the role of venture capitalists and decide whether or not they would invest in a project. Up to 20 projects are selected every year using this process and they become official C-Lab projects. When projects are completed, those that are closely related to Samsung's existing businesses like home appliances or TVs are transferred to each division for further development before market launch. Those that don't fit into Samsung's existing divisions are provided support to launch as an independent company and Samsung also invests money to help those employees launch their business.
