The money will be used for Internet of Things research and development over the next four years.
Samsung pledged to spend $1.2 billion on US-based Internet of Things research and development over the next four years.
CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon delivered the news during an IoT forum in Washington, D.C., where he called for his peers to “start talking and thinking differently” about the space, and pushed for a more human-centric, collaborative approach to the technology.
“At Samsung, putting people at the center of everything we do is our highest value. The same must be true for IoT if we want to realize its full transformative power,” Kwon said in a statement.
It appears Samsung has its eye on health care. “Today, IoT is changing individual lives—helping people to age in their homes. But tomorrow, using IoT, we can give the same independence to millions of Americans,” Kwon said. “We can keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes. As our populations live longer, these benefits and cost savings for society cannot be ignored.”
Tuesday’s event included an announcement of the new National IoT Strategy Dialogue, co-founded by Samsung and hosted by the Information Technology Industry (ITI) Council. The group will design a set of instructions for policy makers, explaining how to enable the technology to benefit individuals, communities, and the economy.
“If we want innovators everywhere to make use of IoT, we must make sure all tools are open to them. This means technologies that connect to each other, because we know that boundaries around technologies hold back innovation and scale,” Kwon said.
For more, watch Samsung’s three-hour event in the video above.
