Email Us
Email Us
Think of them as a formula that describes the best way of doing something. It could be about making a product, managing a process, delivering a service or supplying materials – standards cover a huge range of activities.
Standards are the distilled wisdom of people with expertise in their subject matter and who know the needs of the organizations they represent – people such as manufacturers, sellers, buyers, customers, trade associations, users or regulators.
ISO for Innovation Management, ISO 56000, is an ambitious series of standards by ISO to take on considering the often ambiguous nature of innovation metrics and lack of a consensus definition of what innovation even means.
Organizations by design need standard operating procedures (SOP) to build reliable systems. But when it comes to managing innovation, a vital activity that is necessary for the firm's survival and long term success, there is no SOP to guide them on how to launch, manage, track, measure and learn from their investments in innovation.
Bringing a disciplined method and process to innovation management is a must. This ISO initiative is a welcome news considering so many companies are operating with their back against the wall and can use any help they can get to better structure their innovation activities.
It is a set of standard operation procedures designed to provide a general framework for all organizations, regardless of type, sector or size, toward the successful implementation, maintenance and continual improvement of an innovation management system.
The ISO 56000 series lays out a general guideline for all types of innovation, such as products, services, processes, business models and methods ranging from incremental to radical, as well as all types of approaches, such as internal and open innovation for user-, market-, technology-, and design-driven innovation activities.
Just as theISO 9000 established international standards on quality management and quality assurance, these new ISO 56000 standards will define the definitions, tools, frameworks and methodologies for quality in innovation management.
Published in 2019, ISO 56002 is the first International Standard for innovation management systems. Combining current thinking and research, it is a key tool for organizations because it provides best-practice guidance on how organizations can go about setting up a structured management system for innovation.
“Standards like these help us to train innovation practitioners because they are objective and well structured, enabling us to more effectively maintain and grow this culture.”- Alice de Casanove.
While it’s not currently possible to be certified against ISO56002 (as it’s a guidance document) the document does provide clear guidance in terms of best practice, and therefore it can be used as a basis for an independent review and recognition by a qualified auditor.
We, in the innovation management space have never had a standard to be able to rely upon, and if you look at what's happened in the project management and also the quality management world, that is when it really became professionalized as when the standard was brought into play, and we in the innovation management space believe that with this standard, “focusing on the system”, that it will be something that will actually propel innovation management forward.