ISO 50501: Innovation Game Changer
ISO 50501: The new standard for Innovation Management
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is about publishing a new standard about Innovation Management that will surely shake the market dynamics. Indeed, when it comes to Innovation, each organization has its own culture but in those times of open-innovation and co-working, players must find a common path to collaborate. To do so, many countries have previously published standard to frame innovation management, but none has been able to prevail. This is the reason why the ISO community established a committee of experts composed of 34 members and 14 observers from different geographic & professional origins, to set an international architecture of rules and regulations relevant for organisations and companies about Innovation Management. As of today, the committee gathers 48 countries and 6 international liaisons with international institutions (WIPO, WTO, OECD, CERN, World Bank and EPO).
ISO 5051 Core Principles
Referenced “ISO 50501: Innovation management – Innovation management system – Guidance”, the standard aims to deliver a backbone for Innovation by referencing tools, methods and good practices. This manifest is based on seven core principles:
ISO 50501 to Bring Innovation Management to Next Level
The ISO 50501standard proposes a guide to reach the next level of Innovation Management in covering the key insights:
- Understand the context of the organization and the integration of the global Management System
- Establish the leadership and commitment of top management
- Plan for innovation development
- Identify and foster innovation enablers/driving factors
- Deploy the innovation management process
- Understand and use innovation management tools and methods
- Spread innovation culture
- Assess the performance of the innovation management system and update it if necessary
TC 279/ ISO 50501 Standards Series
The overhead ISO 50501 will be supported by series of complementary standards to be published by ISO Technical Committee 279 (ISO/TC 279) to specify the general outline. The repertoire will contain:
ISO 50503: Tool and Methods for Innovative Partnership
These standards are still at different draft stages by the ISO/TC 279, yet the first standard to be released in 2018 should be the ISO 50503 (Innovation management – Tools and methods for innovative partnerships). The other standards should follow until 2019.
Standards are often perceived as complex to implement through organization and the certification process still represents a barrier to adoption too. To facilitate its early adoption, the ISO 50501 has been thought to offer the flexibility required for innovation. Thus, the ISO 50501 won’t require independent certification, leaving the responsibility for monitoring and assessment to the organization itself. In that purpose, the ISO 50502 (Innovation Management Assessment) will propose the key principles to perform this self-assessment.
ISO 50502: Innovation Management Assessment
In that purpose, the ISO 50502 (Innovation Management Assessment) will propose the key principles to perform this self-assessment.
Despite the transformation that will require the adoption of the standard, the benefits are many. Internal first, the processes formalization will increase the work efficiency while decreasing the risk of failure. External then, simply because the ISO 50501 is a guarantee of professionalism which will improve your brand, increase your competitive advantage and facilitate Public/Private innovation funding
ISO 50501 Prerequisite for Private/Public Funding
From a macro perspective, ISO 50501 will be set in different organisation, thus will spread common terms, tools and methods for Innovation in every sector of the economy. This will then allow multiple ISO 50501-aligned parties to collaborate more easily on innovation topics. For this purpose, the ISO 50502 is proposing three levels of performances for Innovation Management: Existence, Efficiency, Effectiveness.
These three levels of performances will enable partnering companies to understand where they stand respectively and to take the corresponding measures for improvement and alignment in their collaborative innovation process within the common ISO 50501management system.
For this purpose, part of the ISO 50501 is focused on collaborative Innovation and the way players should interact on a project. As such, the standard can also act as a pre-requisite to clusters of companies for collaborative Innovation and R&D. That is the reason motivating the ISO/TC 279 to publish first the ISO 50503 (Tools and methods for innovative partnerships)
Moreover, complying with the ISO 50501 will enables your organisation to highlight its Innovation Management policy and consequently apply with legacy to public funding. For instance, the European Union is already considering the ISO 50501 as a performance indicator for Innovation management and to better allocate funding from the program “Horizon 2020”. More generally it will become more and more challenging for a non-complying company to join a collaborative innovation program where the others are complying. The last one in the row may just stand at the door even though it may have the best expertise, just because it may compromise the whole innovation process.
ISO 50501 Implementation in Practice
Finally, the question is not really: why? but how to adopt the ISO 50501 standard. More effective and recognised Innovation, less risk, a common basis for collaboration: these are the deliverables of the standard. Adoption begins with awareness and in that respect, there is no need to wait until 2019 the publication of all the ISO 50500 standards to capture the good practices for a solid innovation management. The ISO 50503 standard (Tools and methods for innovative partnerships) will come soon and some tools already exist to implement it in practice such as the collaborative platform Industrie 4.0 Smart Platform? .
This Industrie 4.0 Smart Platform? is purposely designed to support innovative commercial or technical partnerships through an intuitive process addressing:
- Innovation management ownership
- Intellectual property and data management
- Value creation targets and measurements
- Limitless scenarios elaboration
- Digital twin mastering uncertainties
- Modeling for collaborative trust and easier adoption
Often restricted to digitization and internet of things (IOT), the ISO 50501 standards remind us that innovation, before connecting things together, needs to connect people through an efficient and secured collaborative process. That is where the ISO 50501 and collaborative tools such as the Industrie 4.0 Smart Platform? come together to enable your company to play collaborative in your digital transition.
