Samsung R&D Institute – Bangalore (SRI-B), Samsung’s largest R&D centre outside Korea, has been conferred the National Intellectual Property Award 2021 and 2022 by the Government of India in the category of top public limited company/private limited company for patents filing, grant and commercialization in India: Services Sector.
Additionally, SRI-B also won the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) IP Enterprises Trophy.
The award was presented to SRI-B by Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Government of India at a ceremony in New Delhi.
“At Samsung, we are honoured to receive this prestigious award from Government of India,” said Mohan Rao Goli, Chief Technology Officer at SRI-B. “It is a recognition of our efforts to upgrade standards in the field of patents and innovation, as well as creating a strong culture of patent filing within our organisation in the areas of Communication Protocols, Visual intelligent Solutions, AI/ML, Internet of Things, Data Intelligence and Services,” he said. “Samsung’s vision is to inspire the world by creating breakthrough innovations, technologies, products and design that enrich people’s lives.”
The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India, confers the annual National Intellectual Property Awards to outstanding innovators, organizations, and companies in the field of patents, designs and trademarks every year.
The National Intellectual Property (IP) Awards are conferred every year to recognize and reward the top achievers comprising individuals, institutions, organizations and enterprises, for their IP creations and commercialization, which have contributed towards strengthening IP eco-system in the country and in encouraging creativity and innovation.
So far, SRI-B has filed over 7,500 patents in India and globally. Engineers at SRI-B have filed patents around areas such as multi-camera solutions, 5G, 6G as well as ultra-wideband wireless communications protocol. These patents have been commercialized in Samsung flagship Galaxy smartphones, smartwatches and network equipment, among others.
Over the last few years, SRI-B has embarked on a path to become a patents powerhouse by improving the quality of innovations and developing a patents mindset among its engineers. IN recent years, many young, first time inventors have emerged at SRI-B.
At SRI-B today, nearly 50 % of patent filers are first-time inventors and about 27% have less than five years of experience. With this strong patent filing culture, SRI-B has seen a 100% increase in annual patent filings over the last four years while commercialization of patents filed by Samsung has increased by four times in last 3 years, meaning these innovations are ultimately offered in Samsung products. The majority of patents filed are in emerging areas such as 5G, AI, ML, IoT, camera & vision technologies.
SRI-B has a specialized intellectual property team that conducts invention-creation training, advanced inventive step training to help employees understand the idea and process of innovation. Most of the patents have been filed by the young millennials and Gen Z who have just entered the workforce.
To simplify the process for the inventors, SRI-B has also set up an internal portal. This portal is a one-stop-shop for all patent filing information that an engineer requires during the process.
In order to strengthen Industry-Academia connect, Samsung R&D has been working with young innovators across top engineering colleges as part of a popular students’ engagement program named Samsung PRISM.
Samsung PRISM was started in 2020 and in the last two years, over 4,500 engineering students and 1,000 professors have worked with SRI-B engineers to deliver live projects successfully. In this time, student and professor teams have filed multiple patents along with SRI-B engineers and have published several research papers in cutting edge domains such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and IoT, strengthening Samsung’s vision of Powering Digital India.
SRI-B is now expanding this program to 70 engineering colleges in India by 2025, aiming to stimulate the Indian innovation ecosystem and make students industry-ready.
