Building an Ecosystem of Innovation: Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow Nurtures India's Young Visionaries

The mood amongst Indian innovators is buoyant. We’ve just landed on the moon, we’re making great strides in nearly all emerging technologies, and India’s young innovators have the privilege of never before seen opportunities like the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Competition, to give them a firm start.

In its second year in India, Samsung India’s Solve for Tomorrow competition is already well on its way towards its stated goal of creating an ecosystem of innovators who support one another. Solve for Tomorrow 2023 built on last year’s success by increasing its outreach to 20,000 students across 31 cities, through 165 roadshows. These programs connected multiple schools and colleges with the competition, and helped bring in even greater participation.

The competition received applications from young innovators across 15 states and 1 union territory of India this year and the entries centred on four core themes: Education and learning; Environment and sustainability; Health and wellness; and Diversity and inclusion.

Since the entries closed in May, the competitors have visited Samsung’s Research Institutes and headquarters across the country, been to an exciting bootcamp at IIT Delhi where they’ve worked closely with experts on various aspects of engineering a solution, and bringing it to the market as a working, feasible and economically viable product or service. They also presented their ideas to a Samsung jury, built, and refined their prototypes.

If you’ve missed all the action, look no further. The first episode of Solve for Tomorrow 2023 recaps the whole inspiring journey, and introduces you to the teams, the experts, the jury and the minds at Samsung who are behind this endeavour. We meet Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT-Delhi, who is delighted by the potential of this competition in empowering young people to bring their ideas to bear on the biggest problems society faces today. “The idea of young people working on problems of society is something that we have to encourage and Solve for Tomorrow provides such a platform.”

We also meet last year’s winners, Team Udaan, Sputnik Brain and Alpha Monitor. While Shankar from Sputnik Brain is delighted by the visibility the competition brought him and his project, Alpha monitor’s Hemesh is already collaborating with Medtech companies and hospitals to bring his solution into action, particularly in the care of dementia patients. Team Udaan is already incorporated, and are on the lookout for further funding.

This is just the start. In the following episodes, we will meet two of the top 10 teams in each episode and delve deeper into their solutions and what they envision. Of course, we also have the grand finale to look forward to, where the Top 3 teams will take home total prize money worth Rs 1.5 crore, in addition to immense bragging rights, and all the learning that this experience has brought them.

Watch the first episode here, and follow along on our innovator’s epic journey to Solve for Tomorrow.