President of Samsung NEXT David Eun has now been named as Samsung’s Chief Innovation Officer (CIO). NEXT is a Samsung unit which works closely with startups in both software and services in order to continually push its own devices forward. So Eun’s new role as Samsung’s CIO actually makes quite a lot of sense. As CIO, Eun will be responsible for pressing the company and its products forward. More directly, he will oversee its continued development in the long term, working to direct the company toward goals set five years out and further. He will hence effectively be reshaping the tech giant, taking responsibility to keeping Samsung ahead of the competition in areas where it currently thrives, as well as making progress in areas where it doesn’t yet lead. In short, he’ll be responsible for defining what “Samsung” means over that longer timeframe.
In the meantime, Eun will retain his duties as President of Samsung NEXT, which was formerly known as the Samsung Global Innovation Center. The two roles are complementary in that they both focus on long-term sustained innovation. As the executive points out, Samsung is currently ranked very high in terms of patents filed in the U.S. and other areas of the world. However, in general, Eun doesn’t believe innovation in five years’ time will look like what it does today. For starters, the CIO doesn’t think singular app experiences will be the norm. Instead, he envisions a world where intelligent connected devices blur the lines between applications and between apps and users. The result, he says will be an interconnected and “customized” experience.
It’s not difficult to imagine that the newly appointed executive will turn out to be correct, given the current push for A.I.-driven experiences and 5G. With that said, the company hasn’t been completely free of challenges over the past several months, having experienced including legal troubles and sudden executive shuffles. Samsung still holds a commanding lead in most markets across many categories of technology but long-term leadership is never a guarantee in such a fast-changing industry.