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After 30 Years, Samsung Is Powering Innovation for India
From factories to R&D, Samsung’s footprint has evolved alongside India’s technology ambitions. Its next bet is on young talent.
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Thirty years is a long time in technology. It is an even more consequential period in the life of a country.
When Samsung began its India journey in 1995, the country was taking its first steps into a newly liberalised economy. Mobile phones were a rarity, the internet had barely arrived and India’s emergence as a global technology and manufacturing power was still years away.
Three decades later, both have been transformed.
India is today one of the world’s largest digital economies, an important manufacturing base and a growing centre for technology, engineering and innovation. Samsung, meanwhile, has grown from a small office in New Delhi into a network of factories, R&D centres, design capabilities and a nationwide consumer ecosystem.
But numbers tell only part of that journey.
“Thirty years ago, many global companies came to India because they saw a large market. Samsung came because we saw something much bigger—we saw potential,” says JB Park, President & CEO, Samsung Southwest Asia.
That potential — in people, ideas and India’s capacity to solve problems at scale — increasingly defines the next phase of Samsung’s journey in the country.
As it enters its fourth decade in India, the question is no longer simply how much Samsung can manufacture, research or design here. It is how the scale built over the past 30 years can contribute to the capabilities India will need for the decades ahead.
That is the larger idea behind #PoweringInnovationForIndia.
Building in India, innovating from India
Samsung today operates two manufacturing facilities in Noida and Chennai, three R&D centres in Bengaluru, Noida and Delhi, and a design centre in Delhi NCR.
Over three decades, that infrastructure has helped move Samsung’s India story progressively from selling here to manufacturing here, researching here and increasingly designing and innovating here.
Indian engineers work in areas ranging from language intelligence and next-generation networks to accessibility and streaming technologies. Samsung has filed more than 14,000 patents in India, while local teams develop products and experiences around the needs of Indian consumers.
But the significance of this footprint goes beyond what is created for India.
Samsung’s engineers in Bengaluru and Noida work alongside colleagues across its global R&D network, developing technologies and solutions that can have relevance far beyond the country.
As Park puts it, “We see India as a place where the future of technology is being imagined, developed and led.”
That shift matters
India’s role in the global technology economy is increasingly moving beyond scale — as a market, manufacturing base or talent pool — towards its ability to originate ideas and solve problems that have wider relevance.
And building that capability requires more than factories, laboratories and patents.
It requires people.
Building People, Transforming Lives: 1.5 Million CSR Beneficiaries Across India
Physical infrastructure can be built relatively quickly. Human capability takes longer.
That is why one of the more consequential strands of Samsung’s 30-year India journey is happening away from its factories and laboratories.
Samsung’s CSR programmes have reached more than 1.5 million beneficiaries across India, spanning technology education, employability and innovation.
Samsung Innovation Campus, the company’s global CSR programme, is helping young Indians develop capabilities in emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence and Gen AI. Since its launch in India in 2022, the programme has trained more than 26,500 young people across the country.
Samsung DOST approaches the opportunity from another direction, preparing young people with job-ready skills for sales and technical service roles through classroom learning and on-the-job training.
One develops capabilities for a technology-driven future. Another creates pathways towards employment.
Samsung Solve for Tomorrow begins somewhere even more fundamental.
It asks young people to identify a problem and gives them the tools to try to solve it.
Together, these programmes point towards a broader idea of nation building: investing not only in the infrastructure India needs today, but in the human capability that can create value tomorrow.
It is an idea that finds resonance in Park’s view of India itself.
“India’s greatest strength is not its size. It is its ability to solve complex problems at scale.”
Beyond the Metros: Half of the Top 40 Teams has Emerged from Tier 2 & 3 Cities
That ability is increasingly visible far beyond India’s established technology centres.
Young people trying to solve problems around healthcare, education, agriculture, accessibility and sustainability are emerging from cities and towns that have traditionally sat outside the country’s technology map.
That is where Samsung Solve for Tomorrow becomes particularly relevant.
Now in its fifth year in India, the programme gives young people aged 14 to 22 a structured pathway to identify a problem, understand the people affected by it, develop an idea and eventually build and test a potential solution.
In 2026, Samsung conducted 184 Design Thinking Workshops across 135 cities, taking structured problem-solving to students across the country.
The workshops introduced young people to methodologies including empathy mapping, problem definition, ideation and prototyping — skills that matter well beyond a single competition.
The scale is significant. But the geography may matter even more.
The national Top 40 this year represent 15 states and 26 cities, with more than half of the teams coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 India. Young innovators from Varanasi, Coimbatore, Guntur, Amritsar, Sundargarh and Rajkot have reached the national semi-finals alongside teams from established technology and education hubs.
That suggests something important about where India’s next generation of innovators could emerge from.
If India wants to become one of the world’s great innovation economies, the opportunity to innovate cannot remain concentrated in a handful of cities.
From an idea to something that can survive
Access, however, is only the beginning.
India has no shortage of ideas. The harder task is giving promising ones the support to move from an observation or prototype towards something that can work in the real world.
Solve for Tomorrow attempts to build that bridge through design thinking, mentorship, technology, prototyping, grants and incubation.
This year’s participants are working across four themes — AI Living for India, Health & Education, Environmental Sustainability, and Sport & Tech.
Their ideas are rooted in problems young Indians see around them: from healthcare and accessible education to agricultural waste, sustainability, small businesses and inclusive sport.
The Top 40 teams receive a cumulative ₹8 lakh for prototype development, along with Samsung laptops for every team member. The Top 20 receive a cumulative ₹20 lakh for prototype enhancement. At the culmination of the programme, the four winning teams will receive a cumulative grant of ₹2 crore for incubation at IIT Delhi.
The objective is not simply to reward an idea.
It is to create a pathway through which a young person can move from recognising a problem to building a potential solution — and, in some cases, eventually an enterprise around it.
Seen through that lens, Solve for Tomorrow becomes more than a youth competition. It becomes part of the infrastructure required for an innovation economy: widening access to problem-solving, mentorship and experimentation. Ultimately, the ambition is for these ideas to move beyond the competition and evolve into start-ups that contribute to India’s innovation economy.
The fourth decade
For much of its first 30 years, Samsung’s contribution to India’s technology story could be measured relatively easily: factories built, products manufactured, engineers employed, patents filed and consumers reached.
The next phase is harder to measure.
How many young people acquire the confidence to solve a problem?
How many students outside India’s largest cities gain access to the tools of innovation?
How many ideas born from distinctly Indian challenges eventually become solutions relevant to the rest of the world?
Those questions bring Samsung’s 30-year journey back to where Park believes India’s greatest opportunity lies.
“India has shown that it can take challenges that seem impossible and turn them into opportunities for innovation,” he said.
That ability — to turn constraint into ingenuity and local problems into potentially scalable solutions — is becoming an increasingly important part of India’s technology story
For Samsung, it also provides a natural bridge between the three decades behind it and the decades ahead.
The first 30 years were about building a presence in India: manufacturing, R&D, design, technology and scale.
The next chapter can be about using that foundation to widen who participates in innovation.
Because the larger story is no longer simply what a global technology company can build in India.
It is what a generation of Indians can build for the country — and potentially for the world.
