Samsung’s Product Innovation Team: How Ideas Becomes Streamlined

When you think about the rapidly changing field of technology, you have to wonder: where does all the innovation come from? What does innovation mean to Samsung? Samsung developed a New Concept Development (NCD) process that all business units could implement and execute when innovating new products and services. As a company, Samsung puts a lot of efforts into innovation. As a p art of Samsung’s overall innovation process, the Project Innovation Team was born out of the need to have an incubator group to work with every business unit to provide more market insight.

The Team was officially established on September 1^st, 2006, and the first PIT office opened in Silicon Valley, California in 2007. The PIT has now expanded globally, though the headquarters remains in California.

PIT’s purpose is to focus on developing production and solution concepts using consumer insight, market-driven technologies and innovation for commercialization.  They do this simultaneously while working directly with the product planning groups for each business unit.

For every concept that PIT develops, the team follows the New Concept Development process which is comprised of Four Stages.

Stage 1. Understand 

The first step towards innovation is to understand what trends are exploding in the world. To accomplish this, PIT conducts field research, and collects data, ideas and information to gain insight into the user’s perspective. The team also studies the market and stays current with who and what is making the most noise.

Stage 2. Ideate

In the second step of NCD, thinkers and designers generate and discuss ideas by analyzing the data collected from field research, essentially brainstorming tens or hundreds of ideas that might provide innovation or solutions to the task at hand.

Stage 3. Concept Development

In this stage, the team compiles all the information they’ve accumulated thus far: the business strategy, the research, and the ideas they’ve generated.  They take this wealth of information and build and refine it into one defining concept. The concept is then developed into a solid business case for the business units.

Step 4. Concept Finalization

At the final stage, PIT works with the business units to finalize product concepts based on market and consumer requirements.

So, now that you know all about the PIT and its innovation process, you can look forward to our next post –how four products went through the NCD process. Stay tuned!