Ankit Jain’s story on the secret sauce for a successful idea

Sherlock Holmes had once remarked to Dr. Watson “You see, but you do not observe”. This distinction had a great impact on Ankit Jain from IOT R&D. He embarked upon his C-Lab idea and emerged as the winner of this year’s C-Lab contest while innovating with simple observations.

C-Lab is the in-house idea incubation program of Samsung that encourages and nurtures innovative ideas. The projects once selected functions as full-fledged start-ups and the participants independently focus to build the solutions based on the use cases. Replicating the Suwon model, Samsung R&D Bangalore (SRI-B), started its C-Lab journey in 2013.

Ankit’s passion to work on consumer pain points and innovate with solutions helped him collaborate with two other IOT R&D members. Collaboration is one of the key components when it comes to building solutions and SRI-B’s collaborative culture encouraged him to work together with Siba Prasad Samal and Ravi Nanjundappa on a new Journey of envisioning the product that could change the way consumers interact with technologies in the near future. Interesting to note that Ankit and his team submitted around 20 ideas out of a total pool of 152 ideas that were submitted towards the C-Lab contest at SRI-B this year. They spent 3 months intermittently to work on the main idea and now with the idea being selected as the winner, they are working on the use-cases to build a strong foundation.

Ankit mentioned, “Well, firstly the leaders from my team are one of the reasons we were able to make it this far. They were not only extremely supportive but also reviewed the project from time to time and shared valuable feedback to improvise and develop further. Secondly our fellow colleagues were very helpful, the discussions and casual surveys with them led to our final product envision”. He reiterated that the start-up kind of functioning makes it quite empowering as the team thinks end-end in terms of a project delivery and also ways to monetize it. As a final advice to all those who would like to run the C-Lab contests in future, “Focus on a broader perspective of the end goal and narrow it down enough so that anyone can understand the basic idea through the created visual at one glance. Try to make the first slide in a way that everyone can understand the idea but it must arouse curiosity too”.

Ankit also holds 2 patents up his sleeve and now channelizing all his efforts to deliver the idea incorporating the insights from customer feedback and inputs shared by the leaders from time to time.

If you share similar interests and want to work in a start-up set up, please visit:

http://www.samsung.com/in/aboutsamsung/careers/careers-center/
https://sec.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/Samsung_Careers