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| Lee Jae-il, vice president of Samsung Electronics' Creativity & Innovation Center, speaks during a press conference in Samsung Electronics SNU Cooperation R&D center at Seoul National University, Wednesday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics said Wednesday it will nurture more than 500 startups here during the next five years by operating a startup support program.
The tech giant has been operating Creative Lab (C-Lab), an in-house startup incubator program, since 2012. Though it was started to nurture innovative ideas from its employees, the firm said it will begin supporting outsiders as well. Samsung said it expects 300 out of 500 startups will be created by those outsiders while 200 will be from its employees.
Samsung said nurturing more startups here is in line with the firm's announcement in August that it would invest about 180 trillion won ($159 billion) over the next three years in response to the government's request to expand investment and employment. Among the total investment, 130 billion won would be allocated to create jobs, foster innovation and share growth with small firms here.
"Nurturing local startups is a duty for a big company like ours. So far, the C-Lab program has spun off 34 startups and those startups created about 170 new jobs," Lee Jae-il, vice president of Samsung Electronics' Creativity & Innovation Center, said during a press conference at Samsung Electronics SNU Cooperation R&D center at Seoul National University.
"Of course, the numbers are small. Among the 34 startups, the largest one has hired about 25 employees. But I believe this will keep increasing to 50, 100 and even beyond 1,000."
Since the company began the C-Lab program, 917 Samsung Electronics employees have taken part in 228 projects. To expand the program to outsiders, Lee said the firm already picked up 15 new startups.
"The startups we chose to support will receive seed money worth 100 billion won ($88.70 million). Not only the seed money, but also Samsung will provide various support programs ranging from product design, applying patents to taxation," Lee said.
Introducing startups that are newly added to Samsung's support program from this month, Jinu Kim, CEO and founder of LINER, said cooperating with Samsung would be a great opportunity for startups.
"I am running a web highlight app LINER and Samsung helped us to promote our business. As Samsung is the largest Android partner, our app has been featured in Samsung's Galaxy Apps store, which brought positive promotion effect," Kim said. "I think working with Samsung has strengths as those startups supported by Samsung can develop their business operations resiliently using Samsung's resources."
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