Executive Mosaic is honored to announce Karen Dahut, executive vice president and head of the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen Hamilton, as the newest inductee into the Wash 100, the premier group of leaders who create value for the American public and execute strategic vision at the intersection of the public and private sectors.

Dahut’s 1,600-person organization features 100 leadership positions and serves all of Booz Allen’s core markets in the commercial, security, defense and civil sectors.

The former Navy officer and comptroller for the Navy’s biomedical research institute told ExecutiveBiz “it really is about taking a fresh or original approach to problems that have plagued our clients for a long time. These are not new problems, but what we want to do is bring creative or fresh solutions to those problems and also show Booz Allen’s commitment to innovation as a firm.”

Dahut came up through the executive ranks at Booz Allen focused on analytics in those core markets, leading Booz’s Economic and Business Analysis team before eventually leading all analytics across the firm after a stint in charge of the firm’s Navy and Marine Corps business.

That included responsibility for intelligence analytics modeling, simulation and cloud, which carries over to her role today.

“Most of our clients have extraordinary amounts of data,” Dahut said. “They don’t know how to store it. They don’t know how to manage it, and they really don’t know how to generate value from it. We want to integrate cloud computing services that span different infrastructure and create analytic tools to help our clients really generate value from their data and insight from their data.”

Dahut focuses on two types on innovation, transformational innovation, or developing new solutions to problems, and adjacent innovation, which is applying developed innovation to new client sets.

“We see clients that are efficiency‑seeking clients, so they are looking for ways to become more efficient in their organization, facing the intense budget pressures that they’re facing,” Dahut said. “So they need innovation to help them to become more efficient.”

“We also see clients that view innovation as a necessity. Despite the cutbacks, despite the budget pressure, they still need real‑time responses to current events and changes in technology. And they see innovation as a necessary tool,” Dahut noted.

The last type of client we see, even in this market, is an advanced innovation buyer. These are the clients that truly regularly work with and procure cutting‑edge technology.  They know they can’t solve their problems without using current software products, and they are very willing to fund the development of innovation solutions.

I am most excited about being able to create these very unique solutions to long, challenging, and really complex problems.

Executive Mosaic extends its congratulations to Karen and the rest of the Booz Allen organization.