Gu Ja-eun, LS Chairman, "Will Complete Agile Innovation Through a Culture of Coexistence"

Emphasizing Digital Transformation and Innovation... "Additional Differentiation Needed to Leap as a Global Company"

Screenshot of Ku Ja-eun, Head of Future Innovation Group, message video revealed at the '2021 LS Agile Demo Day'

[Asia Economy Reporter Lee Hye-young] Koo Ja-eun, the new chairman of LS Group, has embarked on a full-scale management initiative by prominently promoting 'Agile Innovation.' Chairman Koo expressed his determination to root 'Agile Management' throughout the company by sharing achievements related to the group's key task of 'digital transformation' and increasing communication touchpoints with employees.

LS Group announced on the 17th that the Future Innovation Team, led by Chairman Koo, held the ‘2021 LS Agile Demo Day’ event online for three days starting from the 15th to share major achievements in Digital Transformation.

Since 2019, LS has held the Agile Demo Day annually, where the Future Innovation Team and major affiliates collaborate to share agile achievements and discuss future plans. Chairman Koo has been leading the Future Innovation Team and drawing the blueprint for group innovation and future management since his time as chairman of LS Mtron.

This year’s theme was 'Get Agile Right,' featuring programs such as a message from Chairman Koo emphasizing the direction of agile innovation, 'LS Agile Journey' interviewing employees about their agile experiences, and 'Agile Game,' a quiz in which employees directly participated.

Gu Ja-eun, head of LS Future Innovation Group, is participating in the '2021 LS Agile Demo Day' at the Anyang LS Tower on the 16th, presenting agile game challenges to participating employees. (Photo by LS Group)

In particular, on the 16th, Chairman Koo participated in the Agile Game held offline at the LS Tower in Anyang, posing questions on the theme of agile innovation and encouraging the participating employees.

In his message, Chairman Koo said, “For LS to grow further and become a more competitive global company, ‘additional differentiation’ beyond existing differentiation is necessary. To achieve this, we must be able to solve customers’ pain points, which is not simply a problem-solving process but can be found through continuous exploration and discovery based on observation and experience of customers.”

He continued, “The process of additional differentiation through agile will involve numerous conflicts between existing and new values, but through mutual understanding and support between organizations driving agile innovation and those that are not, a ‘culture of coexistence’ can be formed, leading to a more mature organization.”

At this year’s Agile Demo Day, in addition to sharing project cases from each affiliate, examples of organizational change through agile, and expansion into education and cultural foundations were shared company-wide through interviews with employees from related departments.

From a business perspective, LS Electric’s smart distribution solutions and smart factory platform (Tech Square), which started as agile projects, have entered the commercialization stage and begun generating profits. Also, LS Electric’s Automation Research Institute attempted an agile organizational transformation by abolishing team leader positions across the approximately 150-member institute and introducing a squad organization working by project.

Furthermore, at Miraewon, the group’s training center, since 2019, an ‘Agile Working’ education course has been conducted for team leaders and section chiefs, with a total of about 1,250 employees completing it. Approximately 60 employees have applied agile innovation to their work through advanced courses (MBA/T-MBA).

An LS official said, “LS has passed the initial stage of applying agile innovation to business and is now at the stage of absorbing and spreading it into education and organizational culture. Chairman Koo Ja-eun will accelerate the group’s agile innovation further after taking office as group chairman next year and internalize it as LS’s innovation DNA.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.