Samsung Innovation Museum
A large electronics-history museum inside Samsung Digital City, tracing electrical inventions, semiconductors, displays, mobile devices and Samsung’s own product history
Electronics history, historic inventions, semiconductors, displays, mobile phones, Samsung product history, guided technology tours and industrial-design education
A multi-floor museum inside Samsung Digital City, with historic invention galleries on the upper floors, semiconductor/display/mobile galleries below, a product-focused hall and a separate Samsung corporate history hall
The museum is most useful when its two identities remain visible at once: a broad history of electronics leads into an explicitly corporate account of Samsung’s place in that history
Character
A 1745 Leyden jar, Marconi’s 1896 wireless telegraph “Maggie,” an early Edison filament lamp, a 1911 Maytag washer and a 1929 GE Monitor Top refrigerator all appear before Samsung becomes the main subject. The museum starts with the technologies that made an electronics industry possible
Semiconductors, displays and mobile devices lead into Samsung’s own history hall, where Korea’s first 64K DRAM sits alongside Econo televisions, Anycall phones, Perscom computers and Zipel refrigerators
The experience
The permanent route begins high in the building. Hall 1 on the fifth floor covers electricity, lighting, communication, home appliances and radio; Hall 2 on the third floor follows semiconductors, displays and mobile; Hall 3 on the second floor shifts to current Samsung products and future-facing demonstrations
Five suspended cone-shaped sections organize historic material by invention, while original devices sit beside videos and company timelines. The collection extends beyond Samsung: Siemens, General Electric, Philips and other electronics firms appear in the industrial-history sections, and mobile history includes Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X and IBM/BellSouth’s Simon Personal Communicator
The Samsung History Hall on the first floor is more explicitly corporate. It follows products and internal milestones from early black-and-white televisions and refrigerators through memory chips, phones and premium appliances. Other milestones include the High Cold refrigerator and Plus One television
History
Samsung began planning the museum in October 2009. Collecting electronic artifacts and building the roughly 11,000-square-metre facility took about four and a half years before Samsung Innovation Museum opened on 21 April 2014 at the company’s Suwon headquarters
At opening, the museum displayed about 150 historic products supported by hundreds of images and videos
By its tenth anniversary in 2024, Samsung said the museum had received about 500,000 visitors from more than 180 countries. The museum still operates inside the active Suwon headquarters campus where it opened in 2014
Before you go
This is inside an active corporate campus, and the entrance route is more controlled than at a normal city museum. The museum entrance is reached through the parking-tower gate building; Samsung Digital City’s main employee entrances do not serve museum visitors
- Hours
- Weekday visits run 13:00–14:00 by advance reservation. Saturday opening is 10:00–17:00 with last admission at 16:00. Closed Sundays, public and substitute holidays, Labor Day and December 31
- Admission
- Admission to all exhibitions is free
- Access
- Weekday visits require advance reservation; Saturdays do not. Visitors under 13 must be accompanied by an adult, with one adult required for every two younger children
- Transit
- From Mangpo Station on the Suin–Bundang Line, use Exit 4, take bus 15-1 from Yeongtong 2-dong Administrative Welfare Center, and get off at Samsung Digital City Mobile Research Institute; the main-gate area is about a two-minute walk