Tae-Young Kang

EMPACT is Samsung Electronics' Corporate Social Responsibility 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?'

EMPACT facilitates the talented employees of Samsung Electronics and the public to team up with the impoverished people in the remote villages to co-create solutions which would enable the locals to become self-sustaining. 

The goal is to enable Samsung Electronics to provide meaningful and sustainable social impacts as a contribution to creating a better global society, as well as strengthen their long-term competitiveness.

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