The ISO 56001 standard was published last Septemberand launched at an event in Paris on November 19.How does this standard affect business innovation? That's the question we address in this article.
What are the ISO 56002 and ISO 56001 Innovation Management System standards?
The ISO 56000 family of standards covers Innovation Management Systems. It is the result of a consensus between innovation players in many countries. Within this family, 2 standards are particularly relevant to innovative companies. The ISO 56002 standardpublished in 2019, is a standard of recommendations: it conveys a vision of what an effective and resilient organization should comprise, in the service of innovation. Its use is voluntary, but in the end it has had a very measured echo within companies.
The ISO 56001 standard is a requirement standard; it describes what must to be an innovation management system, so that a company can be certified. Its implementation is voluntary, but certification requires the intervention of an auditor.
These two standards, which converge in substance, describe the system in all its components, with a degree of flexibility that enables each organization to implement it in line with its own culture, vision and ambition.
What are the standard's recommendations?
ISO 56001 and ISO 56002 describe the dimensions of the system as part of a continuous improvement approach:
- LeadershipIt covers the innovation vision and strategy, the dissemination of the innovation culture within the company, and the coordination of the various players. We have described the key elements in a webinar on October 3, 2024.
- Planningwhich sets out the objectives and plans how to achieve them, while controlling risks and asserting the logic of innovation portfolio management.
- The supportdescribes the resources and skills mobilized in line with the innovation strategy, and the documentation and communication surrounding innovation within the company. Documentation, important in absolute terms in any system, takes on a particular dimension in a certification approach, providing evidence of the actions and processes implemented.
- The realizationin other words, implementation! It describes the processes involved in carrying out innovation activities for each major phase in the development of innovative projects.
- Performance assessment and improvement are two chapters that organize system improvement on the basis of regular analysis of system efficiency.
What's in it for companies?
As we can see, while the recommendations and requirements are based on common sense and practices in the conduct of innovation activities in companies, achieving an ISO 56001-compliant system is still a long way off for most of them.
But is it really worthwhile for a company to be certified? Today, there is no external incentive for a company to become certified, either in its relations with other companies or with innovation financiers. For many of them, this would mean implementing a series of actions and procedures at breakneck speed, with the perverse effects we have seen with the launch of other standards: the emergence of complex, out-of-touch procedures, an explosion of documentation, urgent compliance on the eve of audits... All symptoms of changes carried out for the wrong reasons and not aligned with company practices.
But if the external incentive doesn't exist (yet),aiming for system improvement based on standards is a good way of helping your organization evolve to improve the efficiency of your innovation activities.. In this case, certification can be chosen as a medium- or long-term objective motivating all the changes to be made to the organization, guided by the recommendations of ISO 56002 or the requirements of ISO 56001.
Standards thus represent a new structured framework, which does not revolutionize innovation practices, but will in future enable a common language and concepts to be shared within a company and between partners.
How can G.A.C. Group help you understand standards?
At G.A.C. Group, noue support our customers in improving their processesthe organization of their resourcesof their innovation strategy, with the help of a comprehensive diagnostic and a market analysis. The ISO 5600X standards are not a revolution in the way we approach the system, but a means and an additional motivation to do so. With this in mind, our approach remains pragmatic, serving the interests of companies, whether certification is an ambition or not.
