Flying the flag for innovation…
How having an innovation management standard can help — and why it might get in the way
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:
· ISO 56000 deals with ‘Fundamentals and Vocabulary’, trying to set out a clear language for innovation management. Not an easy task given that ‘innovation’ is often a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ word — like the character in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ people are prone to use the word to mean whatever it is they want it to mean. But it’s an essential foundation if any kind of innovation system is to operate
· ISO 56001 ‘Innovation Management System — Requirements’ sets out the core model around which the standard is built. It describes what is needed for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an innovation management system.
· ISO 56002 ‘Innovation Management System — Guidance’ builds on these requirements and sets out the ‘how to’ steps needed to implement a system which conforms to these requirements. It describes the kind of processes needed for all stages in the innovation journey from ideation through to commercialization
· ISO 56003 ‘Tools and Methods for Partnership’ picks up a key aspect of today’s innovation context — the fact that it involves a multi-player game. In an era of ‘open innovation’ creating value from ideas will involve various kinds of interaction and collaboration and this document offers guidance and suggested tools for enabling this.
· ISO 56004 ‘Innovation Management Assessment’ offers a framework methodology for assessing an organization’s innovation management maturity, and guidance on how to use this to develop a strategy for building capability and measuring progress in innovation management.
· ISO 56005 ‘Intellectual Property Management’ recognises that innovation is fundamentally about knowledge creation and deployment and provides guidance on IP and how to manage knowledge flows in strategic fashion
· ISO 56006 ‘Strategic Intelligence Management’ deals with gathering and analyzing strategic information to support innovation, helping organizations make informed decisions in a rapidly evolving market.
At its heart is a core model which tries to distil over a hundred years of research and practical experience (of success and failure) and make it available in the form of a model focused on the key building blocks. The underlying approach is to invite organizations to assess themselves against this core ‘good practice’ framework and use that to develop their innovation management strategy, deployed in terms of how they organise innovation, who gets involved and how they put in place processes to ensure they can repeat the innovation trick. Anyone might get lucky once but in an uncertain world there’s a need for such a systematic and systemic approach.
So far, so laudable. There’s no doubting the importance of the topic — in a changing world we can’t sit still, we have to innovate. But that’s going to need more than simply waving our arms in the air and chanting that ‘we believe in innovation’ as a slogan. If we’re serious about innovation then we need to learn to organize and manage it. And we need to develop the ability to repeat the trick, to create a system capable of delivering a steady stream of product and process innovations which create value from ideas.
The growing focus on the ISO standard is valuable in that sense, it provides a focus , it spotlights the need for such thinking. And it helpfully connects that focus of attention to the rich body of knowledge which already exists in the form of courses, textbooks and consulting offerings which have been around for a long time. It sets out a core process model and identifies the routines which need to be out in place to make innovation happen.
ISO’s track record in this is important; as an organization it has a great deal of legitimacy. People have learned to trust its frameworks and guidance as being founded on careful research and evidence collection. So its standards have the power to become powerful normative maps — they shape the development of practice. We’ve seen this in fields like quality management where the ISO 9000 series of standards helped usher in a new global approach.
We already knew what made for delivering consistent reliable quality, we could draw on extensive original work of writers like Shewhart, Juran, Deming and Crosby. We could adapt the practical experience of deploying new methods, especially that gained in the laboratory of post-war Japanese industry. And we could recognise the limitations of current approaches and the frustrations of not being able to control a core organizational process effectively.
What ISO did was collect and codify this knowledge and experience, providing a clear framework against which organizations of many shapes and sizes could assess themselves and use the information to help build for the future. It provided a benchmark against which claims of being a ‘quality’ organization could be measured. Becoming ISO certified became something of value in branding and then essential as procurement departments began to seek out the stamp of approval as a way of securing their purchasing decisions.
It’s been the same story with the ISO 14000 series of standards linked to sustainability and environmental responsibility and in many other areas. ISO standards help provide precision and focus in thinking about key issues and influencing the world of practice. They give us frameworks against which to reflect and enable development pathways to be mapped out in our journey towards competence.
So potentially the ISO 56000 family might help support improved innovation management practice at a time when such capability is becoming an imperative for survival and growth. We desperately need innovation in dealing with so many social and business challenges and having a systematic and evidence-based framework and tools for delivering it seems a valuable resource.
But inevitably the arrival of ISO 56000 raises some questions, particularly around how it might be used. There’s certainly; a value in trying to cut through the hype around innovation and invite organizations to take a more evidence and research-based review of their capabilities rather than swallow the latest faddish prescription. But at the same time there’s a risk that it itself becomes part of the innovation hype cycle. We’ve seen the pattern — new ideas and ways of looking at and working with the innovation challenge catch on and suddenly everyone’s talking about them. Things like innovation labs, agile, reinvention, currently AI become fashion accessories, the ‘must-have’ badge without which no self-respecting organization can afford to be seen. Is ISO 56000 going to be the next one?
There’s certainly growing interest and discussion of the theme — blog posts and conference papers are moving it to centre stage. And there’s an expanding pool of service offerings from consultants offering to help guide organizations in their journey towards developing innovation capability. Linking this to a clear benchmark standard and even holding out the promise of certification underpins much of this
Standards are designed to do this; they create normative pressures which nudge organizations towards exploring and aligning themselves with them. Their existence also creates FOMO — fear of missing out — effect, focusing attention on something which has always been around but which now assumes a more tangible form. Smart organizations have always known it’s a good think to review their innovation approach regularly and to update it to keep pace with a rapidly changing environment. Now that’s becoming a question for many others — are we in shape for innovation? The presence of a clear framework within which to explore the question is attracting a lot of attention. Cue the sound of hundreds of ISO flags being hoisted up the masts of all kinds of ships.
One emerging question which this conversation has triggered is pretty fundamental. Isn’t the very idea of standardisation in conflict with the creative spirit of innovation? Isn’t the presence of one likely to drive out the other? Peter Drucker, one of the godfathers of the innovation management field asked this forty years ago, long before ISO had begun to focus on the issue. And his argument is worth repeating; it’s captured well in the title of his influential piece from 1985 entitled ‘The discipline of innovation’. His view was that despite the popular myths which often surround the idea of innovation and entrepreneurship the reality is that it involves systematic and disciplined work and should be managed like any other key corporate function. It may involve risk-taking but that’s not the same as gambling and the structures which support and enable it need to be robust and reliable.
The danger — which too close an adherence to ISO 56000 might exaggerate — is that the systems, rules and procedures which we put in place to try and manage in such a disciplined fashion become constraint. They stifle creativity and block off the entrepreneurial exploratory spirit.
There’s a precedent for this; during the early days of the standards-led ‘quality revolution’ of the 1990s many organizations were systematically putting in place procedures and frameworks which enabled them to achieve certification to ISO 9000. But some realised that having all the documentation in the world about a plethora of procedures did not in itself lead to quality performance. As one manager memorably explained at the time’ we though we’d go for ISO 9000 certification, but then we realised we ought to focus on doing quality first!’
In other words the presence of a framework standard, however well researched and evidence based, is not substitute for the kind of culture in which innovation is simply ‘the way we do things around here’. Building such cultures which underpin the organizations who regularly populate lists of the world’s ‘top’ innovators, isn’t easy. It requires commitment to review regularly the approaches taken to organizing and managing innovation and then adjusting, adapting, improving on them on a continuing basis.
Which is a core part of the ISO 56000 family, especially with the embedded idea of regular and systematic assessment of performance against the framework as a way of informing the long-term strategic development of innovation management capability. The standard is not the problem, that lies in in the way in which it is used by organizations. It can simply be the latest example of what Steve Blank calls ‘innovation theatre’ — adopting something for show without really engaging with the underlying issues. Or it can be a key resource, a framework for development of innovation management maturity.
There’s also a risk in seeing such a standard as a ‘one size fits all ‘ prescription, something hardly likely to fly in a world where the common challenge of delivering innovation is experienced and met by such a wide variety of organizations. Once again there’s nothing wrong with the standards themselves; they set out clearly and systematically the overall framework against which to develop and improve. But innovation has always been about ‘routines’ — organization specific patterns of behaviour which help deal with the key challenges of innovation like searching for opportunities, selecting amongst options and allocating resources, implementing against a background of uncertain and so on. Over time these behaviours become embedded in processes, policies and procedures, they become ‘the way we do things around here’. But critically each organization has to learn and adapt its own version of them. There’s no harm in borrowing good practices from others but there is no simple plug’n’play model; every organization has to put in the hard work of configuring and implementing their version of these routines.
So a standard like 56000 helps in providing the broad parameters but within them the responsibility is on the shoulders of the adopting organization itself. Learning to manage innovation rather than simply buying into the latest apparently successful prescription. One of the useful by-products of the ISO framework is that it has prompted discussion about how we organize and manage innovation and there are now many case examples of organizations of many different shapes and sizes — public and private, for profit and not-for-profit, big and small and across different sectors — which demonstrate how such configuration within the overall guidelines offered by ISO can work out.
Linked to this is the need to recognize that in any organization bigger than a start-up there is likely to be a portfolio of innovative activity ranging from plenty of incremental ‘do what we do but better’ work to occasional radical ‘do something completely different’ innovation. And these need different ways of organizing and managing ; the rich literature of research on problems of ‘corporate entrepreneurship’ highlights some of these challenges. Organizations need to learn to develop a kind of ‘ambidexterity’ — able to work with different kinds of innovation under the same roof. Something which a blanket application of ISO 56000 might conflict with.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can take from the experience of the quality revolution which ISO standards undoubtedly played a key part in is this. Words like ‘quality’ or ‘innovation’ often hang in the air like ‘motherhood statements’ — very hard to disagree with their value or importance. If we’re going to engage with them then we need to move beyond slogans to specific and put in place the kind of organization which can deliver them consistently. So far , so very much in keeping with the value of having clear framework models and guidelines. But there’s a risk in then giving the ‘mission’ — whether it be quality or innovation — to a dedicated team of specialists responsible for its implementation.
We can certainly benefit from specialist skills and knowledge in these fields but something so central needs to move out of a dedicated silo and become the overall culture of the organization . The way we do things around here. That was the real secret to the quality revolution — getting everyone involved and taking responsibility for delivering quality. Specialist were invaluable as architects, coaches, enablers and advisors. But what worked was widespread engagement — total quality management.
So if we are to see a similar ‘revolution’ in the way we manage innovation we need to work on developing organizations in which all the players know where and how to contribute. Total innovation management, anyone?
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