India’s innovation pipeline is steadily expanding beyond its metropolitan hubs. Across Tier II and Tier III cities, young minds are applying design thinking methodologies to solve everyday challenges rooted in their own communities, and building the foundations of tomorrow’s innovation ecosystem.
Each of the following ideas below, began with a simple observation about everyday life:
1. Making Invisible Water Pollution Visible
Urban rivers often appear cleaner than they are, with microscopic pollutants going undetected. An engineering student, A. Sharanya Rao from Hyderabad, conceptualised a real-time water quality monitoring system that could alert authorities before contamination becomes a public health crisis.
2. Rethinking Food Safety Through Technology
Inspired by growing concerns around food contamination, Vaishvi Kashti from Ahmedabad proposed an intelligent scanning device that could instantly assess food quality, helping households make safer choices before consumption.
3. Smarter Civic Problem-Solving with AI
A student team from Bokaro conceptualised CivicBin, an AI-enabled platform that could identify civic issues such as potholes, water leakages and overflowing drains, route them to the right department, and enable citizens to track their resolution.
4. Designing More Inclusive Cities
In Jammu & Kashmir, Zamin Anayat Lone envisioned a mobile application combining SOS alerts with live-location sharing to improve emergency response and make public spaces safer for persons with disabilities, senior citizens and other vulnerable users. Individually, these ideas respond to local challenges. Collectively, they demonstrate how design thinking encourages young innovators to begin with empathy—observing people, understanding community needs and defining problems before developing solutions.
This is the philosophy behind Samsung‘s Design Thinking Workshops, conducted under the fifth edition of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow. Held across 100 cities, the workshops introduced students to a human-centred innovation framework that encourages participants to observe local challenges, empathise with users, define problems and translate insights into technology-led ideas. The workshops form a part of the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow journey, helping students refine their solutions based on grassroots problems. Working across four themes—AI for a Better Tomorrow, Health & Education, Environmental Sustainability and Sport-Tech—the programme provides a structured pathway for promising ideas to evolve into scalable innovations.
As Samsung marks 30 years in India, its Design Thinking Workshops reflect a broader commitment to nurturing grassroots innovation at its source—equipping young people with the mindset to identify meaningful problems before building solutions. By embedding human-centred design early in the innovation journey, Samsung is helping cultivate a generation of empathetic problem-solvers capable of creating technology with lasting social impact.
