Samsung Innovations is a program that started at the end of last year as a series of workshops for students of three Warsaw universities with different backgrounds – Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), University of Warsaw (UW) and SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities. The general assumption of the program was to strengthen collaboration with universities, find talents & potential employees and promote our R&D institute.

Workshops took place from December 2022 till the end of May 2023. The aim of the initial workshops was to show students where the innovation hides – How to bring out the innovation? How to cultivate different points of view? What is the optimal solution to a problem? Why is reflection important? – these were the issues presented to participants. Students got acquainted with the Design Thinking methodology, and other techniques of creative attitude. Workshops were conducted by Samsung R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL) employees and each workshop ended with an innovative contest – we challenged students to give us their ideas for an innovative method of unlocking a smartphone and ensuring functional efficiency with a high level of security at the same time. There were many unconventional, sometimes abstractive, but definitely creative concepts, from which we chose 3 best of each university and awarded with Samsung prizes. The second step was to invite to SRPOL on June 1 some of previous participants to join the final in-depth workshop on Design Thinking, and give them the task to prepare projects with the theme “Enhancement of everyday technological experiences”. Following the idea of interdisciplinary approach, the teams were formed of students from different universities, which gave them an opportunity to work on a common concept but with different points of views and different educational backgrounds. Before they started empathizing, defining, ideation and prototyping, they drew three conditions from three categories: person, place and emotion, to give them a starting point. Five groups were working hard under the eye of our SRPOL mentors. Students left the workshop with initial concepts and prototypes, which they had to master until the Final Gala.

The Final Gala took place on June 12 in Warsaw Spire Conference Center and it started with Demo Day during which teams presented their projects in front of Jury. We could watch the presentations of HerosGlif geocaching application, CatchMyBus – an application supporting passengers and bus drivers, Mental Mentor – a smart ecosystem for child & homecare, Virtual assistant for psychological therapies and the Smartbag. After deliberations, Jury managed to choose the winners – 1st place went to Virtual assistant prepared by students of WUT and UW, 2nd place went to CatchMyBus by students of WUT and SWPS and the 3rd place went to Mental Mentor by students of UW.

We truly hope that the knowledge the students gained during the whole process will be helpful for their further careers and that the participation in the program was a valuable experience. For us it was a great opportunity to get to know the young generation and look at their fresh creative way of thinking, yet unspoiled by corporative narrative and schemes.

It was also a great pleasure to work on Samsung Innovations with people truly engaged in the program and willing to share their experience and knowledge. We wish to pass special words of gratitude to all SRPOL employees who took part in this event as presenters, mentors, members of the Jury and those who helped us make it happen from the technical side. It wouldn’t have been possible without you!