Samsung R&D Institute- Bangalore Wins the National Intellectual Property Award 2018

Samsung R&D Institute India – Bangalore (SRI-B) has been conferred the National Intellectual Property Award 2018 by the government of India in the category of top foreign public limited company/private limited company for patents and commercialization.

The R&D centre has got the award for building a culture of innovation and patent filing within the organization as well as for the number of patents filed and commercialized.

Dr. Aloknath De (Centre), Chief Technology Officer at SRI-B receiving the award from Mr. Suresh Prabhu (Second from left), Minister of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.

The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India, confers the annual National Intellectual Property Awards to outstanding innovators, organizations, and companies in the field of patents, designs and trademarks every year.

The award was presented to SRI-B by Mr. Suresh Prabhu, Minister of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.

“At Samsung, we feel honoured to receive this prestigious award from Government of India. The recognition is a testimony to our efforts to upgrade standards in the field of patents and innovation. Samsung’s vision is to inspire the world and create the future through innovative technologies, products and design that enrich people’s lives,” said Dr. Aloknath De, Chief Technology Officer, SRI-B.

Till date, SRI-B has filed over 2,900 patent applications. Every year the centre files between 250-300 patents across a diverse range of technologies.

Over the last few years, SRI-B had embarked on a path to become a patents powerhouse by improving the quality of innovations and developing a patent mindset among its engineers.

The first job was to cultivate an innovation and patents mindset among engineers at SRI-B. A specialized team was set up that organized basic invention creation training and an advanced inventive step training to help engineers understand the idea of innovation and how to innovate.

This was followed up by training for top quality invention creation, helping SRI-B improve the quality of patents being filed.

For engineers to better understand how to strengthen their ideas, face-to-face counseling was done and patent engineers were aligned to different teams in different technology areas.

SRI-B also set up an internal portal for filing patents, which became a one-stop shop for all patent filing information and needs of an engineer, making the process of filing patents simpler.

In India, Samsung has 5 R&D centres—2 in Bangalore and one each in Noida, Delhi and Pune. The R&D centre in Bangalore (SRI-B) is the largest R&D Centre of Samsung Electronics outside Korea. The Indian R&D centres contribute substantially to global product development as well as to India specific products and services under the company’s ‘Make for India’ initiative.

The innovation culture that has been developed at SRI-B, combined with Samsung’s ‘Make for India’ initiative that focusses on creating solutions for its Indian consumers, has led to several interesting features being developed for Samsung devices. A recent example is the Social Camera mode that was launched in the Samsung Galaxy J7 Max smartphone. The Social Camera mode allows users to instantly edit and share photos and videos directly to social media sites from their camera app. The patents for this feature were developed at SRI-B and later commercialized for devices.

SRI-B had previously won the National Intellectual Property Award in 2015 and also received the Zinnov ‘Great Place to Innovate’ Award in 2015 and 2017.