Samsung R&D X Nonlinear

Enabling Collaborative Innovation Through Design Thinking

Innovation Workshops

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Background & Objective

Samsung R&D’s IP & Innovation Management team sought to strengthen internal innovation capability through hands-on, team-based learning. The challenge was to make innovation not only collaborative and strategic, but also accessible and engaging for participants coming from varied domains.

Nonlinear was first invited during the COVID-19 lockdown to conduct a remote design thinking workshop, helping Samsung teams navigate creative problem-solving in a distributed setup. The success of this session led to a second engagement — an offline, full-day innovation workshop focused on building team alignment, structured ideation, and pitch-readiness for new ideas.

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Solution

How Nonlinear Added Value

For the online session, Nonlinear used the Miro platform to recreate a live collaborative environment. Teams explored customer-centric innovation, cognitive biases, and rapid ideation frameworks using digital templates and activity flows. Despite being remote, the session felt dynamic and applied — helping participants generate new ideas and rework existing ones on the spot.

The offline workshop was built as a hands-on corporate innovation lab, designed specifically to help Samsung teams tackle high-stakes business challenges through structured creativity. Drawing from Nonlinear’s visual innovation toolkit, teams were guided through exercises like stakeholder mapping, cognitive bias identification, opportunity framing, and solution prototyping.

The session focused on helping teams align around real innovation challenges within their domains — from R&D bottlenecks to cross-team process inefficiencies and untapped market opportunities. Participants explored how to reframe technical or operational blockers into design challenges that could be solved through customer-centric thinking.

To support these outcomes, participants engaged with Nonlinear’s proprietary Design Thinking Game — a structured, gamified toolkit designed to teach design mindsets and catalyze ideation. The game format helped teams internalize complex innovation models through play-based learning, making methods like empathy building, ideation, prototyping, and feedback loops both accessible and action-oriented. This hands-on approach created an energetic environment where abstract concepts became tangible, repeatable, and directly applicable to Samsung’s corporate contex

Both sessions — online and offline — were designed to break silos, spark team collaboration, and elevate individual creative confidence. The hybrid approach demonstrated how innovation facilitation can be effective across formats.

Samsung R&D

Impact Delivered

  • Fostered collaboration and alignment across distributed teams

  • Applied design thinking to real-time product, IP, and process challenges

  • Enabled a structured yet creative way to generate and prioritize ideas

  • Delivered an engaging learning experience across both online and offline formats

  • Led to repeat engagement and workshop recommendation within the organization

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What Samsung R&D Gained from Nonlinear

Innovation isn’t a one-off event — it’s a mindset that can be nurtured with the right environment, structure, and facilitation. At Samsung R&D, Nonlinear helped build that foundation, both virtually and in person, through thoughtful design, compelling tools, and facilitation that moves people to action.