Lem Lasher is CSC’s Chief Innovation Officer. CSC is a global tech and business services company.

Background:

[These are my quick notes, complete with  (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error.  Please excuse those. Thanks!

From time to time, I'll insert my own editorial comments - exercising the prerogatives of the blogger.  I'll show those in brackets. ]

Notes:

• They have a corporate-wide office of innovation.
• They learned early that it is hard to get a good focus on innovation because there are many competing/diffuse definitions of innovation.
• Can’t just focus on idea creation.  You also need the intellectual rigor and discipline to translate great ideas into practical business solutions and then deliver them.
• Four themes of their innovation strategy: leadership, process, governance, enablement.
• Paradox: really good management will kill innovation because good managers are trained to eliminate risk.
• Good managers shouldn’t focus on individual innovators; instead focus on creating a good environment for innovation.
• Look at innovation as part of an entire system — need to attend to innovators, customers, external partners
• They enable and facilitate — rather managing in a command-and-control way
• They focus on NEXT Practices rather than BEST practices
  • He says that if you implement best practices you just as good as the next guy.  BUT you need to be better.
• E2.0 has taken off in CSC, based on a Jive platform. Nearly 50% of the employees are active on it.
• Lem Lasher ended by announcing Clare Flanagan’s promotion. Nice!