Myoung-hwan Han

EMPACT is Samsung Electronics’ new Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative that is based on empowering disadvantaged communities. 

The project was conceived in reaction to the lack of public awareness and distrust around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The majority of customers, including those of the electronics market, remain indifferent to any CSR initiatives because many companies have widely exaggerated their contributions to the society in their marketing campaigns. As a result, positive awareness continues to dwindle and trust is lost.

Due to this vicious cycle, many companies find themselves in a state of anxiety over excessive increase in costs for the upkeep of such initiatives and the public distrust that continues to dampen their efforts. To address the need to change current situation, our project is defined as follows:

'How might we facilitate Samsung Electronics’ desire to create meaningful and long lived social impacts, as well as strengthening their long-term competitiveness?'

As a team, Tae-young Kang and I are creating a pilot platform that will be implemented in marginalised communities across India, such as urban slums and off-grid rural villages. The platform will house interlinked activities which will enable the company to create solutions to alleviate poverty with the people in the communities. 

The solutions from the platform will be encouraged to be designed in such a way that maintenance and operation will be performed by the people in the communities or the local NGOs that work in the region.

Based on this grass-roots approach, the platform will deliver scalable solutions to bring nationwide impact, which in effect will inspire the public and rebuild trust.

We anticipate that the combination of community engagement with CSR activities and a transformed company approach that drives impact from the bottom-up direction will generate sustainable solutions for these communities. This will kick-start rebuilding of public trust and expand Samsung Electronics’ capability to create shared value between the business and the society.

The theme of this project originated from my dissertation 'Contagion effect on social networks', a study of how to improve the efficiency of fundraising utilising on-offline social network, and also my colleague Tae-young Kang's ‘The Green Storm Strategy', a study on ways to build a competitive advantage strategy for CSR.