ISO 50501 is closing in on a final draft

Less than a year until the innovation management standard is published

The last few months has been overly busy. I have spent oceans of time working on the ISO standard, packaging innovation services, preparing speeches, and so on. Most of it is extremely rewarding though. Let me start off by summarizing the status of the ISO innovation management work.

Plenary meeting with ISO Technical Committee 279

In March I was in London for a week working on the next version of the ISO 50501 Innovation Management Systems standard. This was a plenary meeting, so all working groups gathered throughout the week. There are several working groups working on different standards on innovation management that complement each other to support the innovation community with a full set of guidelines.

Committed committee delegates during the plenary session.

Personally I focus on the main standard ISO 50501 Innovation Management System that will provide guided support for any organization that wishes to implement a full management system for innovation. The 50501 standard covers many vital issues when setting up and finetuning your system. Some of the areas covered are how to understand the organization and its context, how to manage innovation leadership and define innovation vision, strategy and policy, how to conduct planning to acheive strategic innovation objectives, how to support and improve innovation through culture, collaboration, strategic intelligence, intellectual property, etc. The standard also contains guidelines on how to run and manage innovation initiatives, processes and portfolios, and then finally it brings up the matter on continuous performance evaluation of the innovation management system.

The ISO innovation management standards structure

And like I mentioned there are a number of complementary standard documents under development to further immerse oneselves into certain sections of the system. The current ones are the following:

  • ISO 50500, Fundamentals and vocabulary. This technical document clarifies the terms used in the other documents.
  • ISO 50501, Innovation management system. This is the main standard that will be the international standard (IS).
  • ISO 50502, Innovation management assessment. This is a technical document specifying the process and methods of how to evaluate the performance of the innovation management system.
  • ISO 50503, Tools and methods for innovation partnership. This technical document covers necessary tools and methods for innovation support.
  • ISO 50504, Strategic intelligence management. This technical document covers competitive and market intelligence as part of innovation support.
  • ISO 50505, Intellectual property management. This technical document covers patent and property rights management as part of innovation support.
  • ISO 50506, Idea management. This technical document will cover idea generation, ideation and idea management as part of innovation support. (The document number has not been officially decided yet.)

Next steps

During the London meeting we started to finalize the last round of comments from the 52 participating countries. Altogether we had 218 pages of comments to approach, consisting of an total of 758 comments. Once we have finished this round of comments and improvements the standard will go into final draft mode. We are having a work meeting for one week in Portugal in May and then we will present the final draft (FDIS) at the next plenary meeting in Tokyo in October. After ISO has pushed the FDIS through its administrative processes we may actually see the innovation management standard published as expected in the beginning of 2019.

As the systems standard is going to be published soon I will continue my work in the idea management workgroup. Idea management is one of the core components of an innovation process, so I am looking forward to share my expertise in developing a standard for that as well.

3 Comments on ISO 50501 is closing in on a final draft

  1. Thanks for your sharing. I am strongly interted in this series of standard and eager to know the latest information about it.

    • Hi Pablo,

      1. First an update: ISO changed the numbering series from 50500 to 56000. So the Innovation Management System standard will be ISO 56002.
      2. Yes, on the ISO website. BUT it has not been published yet. As soon as it is official I will write an article on the topic. We expect within a month or two.

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