I’m standing inside Samsung Digital City, where some 35,000 employees work, eat, play, and work some more in Suwon, South Korea. It feels like a university campus with green parks, throngs of young people, social clubs and coffee shops. There’s also a massive cafeteria where everything, from pizza to kimchi, is free.

In other words, it seems like a fun place to work.

But Samsung, the world’s largest maker of smartphones, TVs and memory chips, is perpetually in crisis mode. In part, that’s by design: Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee once wrote that a successful company needs to maintain a “heightened sense of crisis,” meaning even in the good times, it must anticipate change ahead.

That couldn’t be more true, now. Global smartphone sales are declining, pressuring Samsung Electronics’ largest business line. (Exploding phones in 2016 didn’t help.) An escalating trade war between South Korea and Japan threatens to raise the company’s costs. And Samsung’s de-facto leader Lee Jae-yong, the chairman’s son, is also facing a retrial on bribery charges.

Under pressure on multiple fronts, Samsung is eager to find the next big thing beyond smartphones or memory chips to power the company’s future growth. It’s pouring some $22 billion over three years into areas like 5G and automotive electronics, led primarily by investments in Samsung Electronics. (The conglomerate’s other business lines include shipbuilding, construction and insurance.) Much of that innovation and experimentation is coming out of secretive research and development labs at Digital City.

In July, CNN was granted rare access to tour those labs.

Here’s what we saw.