ISO – Inspiring successful innovation with new International Standard

An innovation management system helps organizations capture the best ideas and continually improve to keep up with the competition. The latest standard in the ISO innovation management series has just been published.

ISO 56000, Innovation management – Fundamentals and vocabulary, is the fourth of an eight-part series of standards and other guidance documents designed to help organizations use the correct terminology for innovation management and communicate consistently about their processes, achievements and learning paths. It provides the vocabulary, fundamental concepts and principles of innovation management, and is useful for organizations wanting to make their innovation management activities visible and credible.

Alice de Casanove, Chair of the ISO technical committee responsible for the standard, says all organizations, whatever their nature or size, need to continually evolve in order to survive, and the ISO 56000 series will help them to do that in a structured and effective way.

“Innovation is about creating something new that adds value; this can be a product, a service, a business model or an organization. And the value that is added is not necessarily financial, it can also be social or environmental, for example,” she says.

“The ISO 56000 family will help organizations significantly improve their ability to survive in our changing and uncertain world. They allow organizations to permanently reinvent themselves.”

The experts that created ISO 56000 worked closely with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to establish a common understanding of the concept of innovation. The agreed definitions are now used in both ISO standards and in the OECD-EU’s Oslo Manual, which is the international reference guide for collecting and using data on innovation.

The World Bank, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were also consulted on technical points of terminology at several stages of the standard’s development.

Aside from ISO 56000, the ISO series on innovation management includes the following published documents:

It also has several standards in development, including: 

The ISO 56000 family was developed by technical committee ISO/TC 279, Innovation management, whose secretariat is held by AFNOR, ISO’s member for France. All published documents in the series can be purchased from your national ISO member or through the ISO Store.