Strategic Direction

How Samsung nurtures new ideas: Sound knowledge base for R&D innovation
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(2005) "How Samsung nurtures new ideas: Sound knowledge base for R&D innovation", Strategic Direction, Vol. 21 Issue: 4, pp.6-8,
https://doi.org/10.1108/02580540510589620
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 How Samsung nurtures new ideas
Sound knowledge base for R&D innovation

Inventing the ways to stay ahead

The shortening product life of high-tech goods, brought about by an ever-present need to
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keep ahead of the competition, has led to an ever-greater reliance on the output from
research and development teams.
We all expect, and demand, a constant stream of new, high-tech products which will help us
both work and play everything from more efficient and more powerful technology to help
us at work, to state-of-the-art life-saving medical equipment to keep us alive, or just
something miraculous and exciting in the way of home entertainment. Few aspects of life
escape the ingenuity of the researchers and developers.
The public expects! And the public usually gets, from a whole range of companies
worldwide which depend on very clever R&D people thinking both the thinkable and the
unthinkable, constantly improving, changing and inventing.
As dynamic changes in the business environment take place, the dependence of high-tech
industries on R&D is becoming increasingly critical, with the heavy responsibility to innovate
constantly on the shoulders of R&D departments.

Important to embrace a different attitude

Because R&D is a knowledge-intensive process it exists to create new knowledge for
future business performance the importance of applying knowledge management to its
functions and outcomes cannot be stressed too highly, nor must the importance of KM as an
innovative tool be ignored.
The fact that R&D organizations have different values and objectives from other
organizations must also be addressed. Their attitudes and conceptions of the business as
a whole may differ from those in other parts of the organization. For instance, R&D
organizations tend to value 500 percent prospective market or profit creation higher than 50
percent assured process efficiency improvement. KM performance measures, which play a
critical role in directing activities to achieve organizational objectives and strategy, must
reflect this R&D characteristic.
What must also be borne in mind are the human resources of R&D organizations typically
highly-educated and talented people, mostly of an engineering or science background.
They tend to avoid low value creating activities and usually aspire to the pursuit of their own
research objectives.

Balancing the formal and informal

While it is not easy to be prescriptive for all such organizations, consideration should be
given to providing researchers with a KM system that will address their own aspirations for

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 self-development. As such, R&D KM must support knowledge, not only for project
application, but also basic theory development. A matrix operational system may be a good
idea to address such desires, where formal systems for effective project management and
informal systems (such as communities of practice support for common research interest
groups), are provided in a balanced manner.
KM in R&D organizations must focus on providing a basis not only for knowledge creation,
but also knowledge development in new products. In this aspect, design of KM activity
mechanism is critical, through which tacit knowledge is transformed into explicit, and is
eventually shared with others. Sharing knowledge and the resulting knowledge integration is
an indispensable condition for synergy exploitation. Successful realization of such a
mechanism requires that KM activities, IT systems, organizational rules, change
management practices and other KM enablers be integrated effectively.
It is also essential to consider the task characteristics of R&D organizations. Strategic
activities and tasks of an R&D organization are typically performed on a project basis.
Project related tasks are, therefore, core in R&D organizations. R&D projects are inherently
future oriented and commonly require a high level of creativity. Because of the high
uncertainty typically associated with R&D projects, changes in anticipated processes and/or
methodologies are often needed, and which lead to informal communication. KM systems
must remain flexible and autonomous enough to take account of this.
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Systematic storage and reuse of knowledge

The Samsung Groups Advanced Institute of Technology has been implementing R&D
process standardization and improvement since the mid 1990s, with knowledge
management one of the core activities since 1999 initially established for the systematic
storage and re-use of the knowledge derived from its R&D activities.
SAIT played a leading role in establishing a group-wide CoP (communities of practice) method
for KM which, during the early phase, mainly focused on store and share core research outputs
and to stimulate information sharing and distribution among the affiliate companies.
Although the CoP developed at an impressive rate (especially in terms of the volume of
knowledge created and number of membership), it was soon discovered that the increase in
volume did not necessarily lead to knowledge utilization. Faced with this challenge, for the
past five years SAIT has been working to create KM methodologies customized for R&D
organizations.

Encouragement to share ideas

KM at SAIT explicitly defines project based knowledge expression, evaluation, storage and
sharing activities. Its various systems and rules are designed to support these activities. In
addition to these basic KM activities, SAIT also provides various formal and informal
activities through which organizational members may actively express and share their ideas:
B Design review. A formal review process at the end of each phase to ensure that each
project phase has properly completed originally planned tasks (or, if changes were made,
they were appropriate).
B Knowledge intensive staff innovation plan. A problem-solving framework used in all SAIT
meetings, including problem recognition and sharing, solution generation by all

Because R&D exists to create new knowledge for future business

performance the importance of applying knowledge
management to its functions and outcomes cannot be stressed
too highly.

j j
VOL. 21 NO. 4 2005 STRATEGIC DIRECTION PAGE 7
 R&D organizations have different values and objectives from
other organizations.

participants, translation of solutions into plans, and implementation schedule

development.
B Patent Review Committee (PRC). To systematically support patent registration and
enhance patent quality.
B Patent expo. In contrast to the formal PRC, this is an informal and open system where
researchers of any background are invited to share new ideas and potential problems.
Keywords: SAIT has received wide recognition for introducing KM measurement metrics consistent with
Knowledge management, the organizations values and strategic objectives. Its template based management system
Research and development, enables consistent management of core knowledge, and its various informal groups form a
Creative thinking sound basis for the generation of new ideas.

Comment
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This review is based on Knowledge management as enabling R&D innovation in high tech
industry: the case of SAIT by Woojong Suh, (Assistant Professor, Division of Business, Inha
University, Inchean, Korea), J.H. Derick Sohn (Associate Professor, Faculty of Business
Administration, University of Seoul, Korea), and Jun Yeon Kwak (Center Head, Technology
Management Center, Samsung Institute of Advanced Technology, Suwon, Korea). They
present a knowledge management model for R&D organizations and discuss how to employ
it for their innovation. They note that, while the importance of KM is safely established, the
received literature has yet to provide an integrative model of various factors associated with
KM activities. They present a new model illustrating core KM elements in R&D organizations,
and report on the experience of the Samsung Groups central R&D facility, SAIT, where the
model was successfully implemented.

Reference
Suh, W., Sohn, J.H.D. and Kwak, J.K. (2004), Knowledge management as enabling R&D innovation in
high tech industry: the case of SAIT, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 8 No. 6, pp. 5-15, ISSN
1367-3270.

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