Post-Convention Seminar 7

CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation

Making Organisational Innovation a Personal Prowl

At the core, all innovation is personal. And not a day goes by without a reminder of the importance of innovation to the long-term success of our organisations. But the words that follow the reminder most often reflect a strategic orientation posed at a macro level. Words like systems, discontinuities, strategic intent and core competence abound. And all of those words are important from a strategic perspective. Steve Lundin firmly believes that innovation is personal and asks why we don’t hear more from the personal point of view. The closest we get is a description of the corporation that sounds personal but is not. It is simply an organisation given human qualities.

The basic premise of CATS is that an organisation is innovative only if the individual human beings within the organisation are innovative. CATS therefore refuses to pander to the strategic, complex and abstract in favor of the personal, simple and practical. If the individual human beings that populate an organisation become more innovative then the organisation will become more innovative. And each of the nine lives is a concrete step toward that goal.