A standard is an old word for a flag. Back in the days of sailing ships you could see a forest of them fluttering at the stern of ships of all shapes and sizes, proudly declaring their allegiance to a particular country. And right now in the innovation world we’ve got a similar display of ‘ships’ — organizations of various shapes and sizes all flying the new ISO 56000 flag — the Innovation Management Standard.
We’ve moved from the days of exploratory voyages, small ships piloting the waters, trying to chart the emerging cartography. Now, after ten years or more of discussion and debate we have the full squadron proudly sailing into view, seven ‘ships of the line’ flying the standard and inviting others to sign up.
Leaving the metaphor aside there’s clearly quite a lot of activity going on in the innovation management harbour and it might be worth taking a closer look. First of all, what is it? It’s an attempt to capture and codify what we’ve learned about managing innovation to enable organizations to take a systemic view and put such a framework into systematic practice. There have been innumerable conversations, drafts, discussions and other movements behind the scenes but the standard is now published and available. There are seven core documents, each with accompanying detail and covering different complementary areas.
This blog/podcast explores what's in the standard, why it matters and what it means for innovation management practitioners.
Commenti