On my first visit to Samsung’s Suwon complex, the headquarters of the company’s electronics and appliance division was even more Third World than I expected. The factory floors were bare concrete. People hand-wheeled parts to and from the production line. The research lab reminded me of a dilapidated high-school science classroom. But the work going on at Suwon—what they were doing with televisions, for example—was intriguing. At the time, there wasn’t a single TV station in Korea that could broadcast in color. But Samsung’s engineers had gathered color televisions from every leading company in the world—RCA, GE, Hitachi—and were using them to design a model of their own.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 1989 issue of Harvard Business Review.
