Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore Wins Three Awards for Intrapreneurship & Breakthrough Innovation at Vanguard Awards 2023

Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore (SRI-B), the company’s largest software R&D centre outside Korea, has won three awards – Gold Winner in the category of ‘Intrapreneurial Practice Award’, ‘Breakthrough Business Ideas’ and Star Intrapreneur Awards at the recently held Vanguard Awards on April 27, 2023.

SmartThings team from SRI-B receiving the ‘Breakthrough Business Ideas’

The Vanguard Awards recognizes rewards and motivates intrapreneurial effort with the strong belief that celebrating, and championing role models will inspire more organizations and leaders to tread this path. The Vanguard Awards is a pioneering, one of its kind, cross industry recognition program focused on Intrapreneurship in multiple forms. The 2023 edition saw more than 50 companies participate and vie for the top honours.

The Intrapreneurial Practice Award conferred to SRI-B for fostering a culture of Intrapreneurial leadership and end-to-end innovation. The IP & Innovation Group under the Chief Technology Officer champions the Intrapreneurship Program. The key pillars of the Intrapreneurship Program are Creative Lab (C-Lab) – Idea to Product, Breakthrough Innovation & Advanced Development Project Creation & Open Innovation – Partnering with Local Ecosystem Start-ups.

Syam Sidhardhan from SmartThings Team at SRI-B developed the World’s first One chip solution for Smart devices with Matter Thread & ZigBee certification. ZigBee & Matter Thread One Chip is a First of its kind innovative firmware plus software solution, which leverages a single radio chip to support multiple communication technologies such as ZigBee and Matter Thread protocol communication together in a multiplexing manner. This solution made Samsung’s smart home devices easily connectable with both legacy and modern smart home appliances seamlessly, without customer having to buy newer devices for compatibility with Matter Thread.

SRI-B receiving the ‘Intrapreneurial Practice Award’

In the 27 years since its foundation, SRI-B has developed several products and solutions for both the national and global market, with several ‘world’s firsts’ conceptualized and developed out of this R&D center.

Taking the Intrapreneurial culture forward, Praveen George, a senior product manager at SRI-B is credited with solving one of the main customer pain points in India – financing for electronic appliances. Samsung Finance+ was born out of the idea of a digital lending platform having tie-ups with multiple NBFCs to provide loans for Samsung customers looking to purchase Samsung products from offline stores. Today this digital lending platform, Samsung Finance+ is present in 70,000 plus stores in India and helped more than 7 million customers to purchase Samsung products with financing. Praveen was conferred with the Star Intrapreneur Award for his contribution.

“Over the last two decades, SRI-B has strived for building an intrapreneurial spirit within employees, allowing them to envision the future, think creatively, and transform ideas into value innovation. This award is a recognition of our focus on product development, advanced research and IP creation for software solutions. The award also recognizes all our innovators who have been creating intellectual property and contributing to the culture of intrapreneurship in the organization,” said Mohan Rao Goli, Chief Technology Officer, SRI-B.

Mohan Rao Goli, CTO, SRIB along with other panellists

SRI-B focuses on product development related to Device eXperience business of Samsung. Over the years, SRI-B has set up Centre of Excellences in Wireless Communication, Multimedia Technology, On-Device AI, Voice Interface and IoT.

The centre has built end-to-end expertise in COEs through product management and UX Design thinking. The R&D centre’s key focus is to create global product differentiation and solutions for the Indian market by identifying unique insights and deliver value to consumers.