ISO 56000: Building an Innovation Management System: Bring Creativity and Curiosity to Your QMS

By Peter Merrill

Innovation management can provide a competitive edge in the business world, and research shows a major correlation between profitability and innovation. The challenge, however, is how to integrate innovation management with quality management. Enter the ISO 56000 series of standards on innovation management systems (IMS). Specifically, ISO 56002 provides guidance on how to develop a systems approach to managing innovation. In this book, author Peter Merrill shares with readers the thinking behind each of the clauses in the standard. He explains real-life, practical applications of the guidance the standard provides and shows how to integrate an IMS with a quality management system based on ISO 9001 and be prepared for the future.

In this book, you will discover how it:Details the strategy and leadership necessary to manage innovation using ISO 56002 and explaining the cultures of creativity and execution that must coexist
Defines the competences, tools, processes, and assessments that are needed to build an IMS in your organization in order to succeed at innovation
Explains the principles that are the basis of innovation management
Shows the vital role of innovation and creativity in the progression of organizations in today's Industry 4.0/Quality 4.0 era
Underlines the idea that innovation management and quality management must work together from practical and financial standpoints

Peter Merrill has been a quality professional for many years and is an expert on simplifying complex ideas. Currently, he helps companies develop their approach to innovation. He writes extensively on innovation, including the Innovation Imperative, column for Quality Progress magazine. His previously published books include Innovation Generation, Innovation Never Stops, Executive Guide to Innovation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ASQ Quality Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951058272

Peter Merrill

Peter Merrill has been a quality professional for many years and is an expert on simplifying complex ideas. Currently, he helps companies develop their approach to innovation. He writes extensively on innovation, including the “Innovation Imperative” column for Quality Progress magazine. His previously published books include Innovation Generation, Innovation Never Stops, and Executive Guide to Innovation.

Book preview

Preface

Innovation is exciting. It is about the future and about changing from the world of today. It is full of promise and gives us the opportunity to release our own natural creativity. And yet, it can be overwhelming. The word innovation is overused and often misused. We need to understand what it really means and where to begin if we want to innovate. Do we start with strategy, process, culture, or somewhere else?

I wrote my first book on innovation more than 10 years ago. In that time, it is remarkable what has changed and what has stayed the same. Some people say it is not possible to capture innovation methods because they are changing too fast. They are wrong. Innovation is not new. It was first written about by Machiavelli in his book The Prince in 1532. It is the outputs of the methods that are changing fast. Many of the methods themselves have been with us for decades. What has changed in the last 30 years is the recognition that a systems approach to managing an organization is necessary for an organization to become a serial innovator.

My most recent book, Innovation Never Stops, shows how relentless the innovation game has become. This book introduces the ISO 56000 series of standards on innovation management. The primary focus of the book is ISO 56002, and I will explain in detail how to use this innovation manage­ment system guidance standard. This standard shows how to initiate and how to execute innovation, and it shows how a systems approach to innovation is without a doubt the best approach. It also shows that if you have a quality management system that is based on ISO 9001, you can develop it into an innovation management system (IMS). ISO 56002 has been designed to integrate with ISO 9001 and has been developed through consensus of technical committees from nearly 40 countries. An auditable require­­ments version of this standard will be ISO 56001, and you can use ISO 56002 to develop your IMS ahead of that standard being written. You can start with strategy, as the standard does, or you can start with process, if you want to begin with a contained approach. ISO 56002 gives major guid­ance on culture and the key issues to look out for as you develop your IMS.

This standard is not just one person’s ideas but the collective knowledge of hundreds of people globally. I was one of those people, and I was Head of Delegation for my country, Canada, to ISO/TC 279, the technical committee that wrote the standard. I will give you the thinking behind each of the clauses in the standard. I will explain real-life, practical applications of the guidance the standard gives.

As a chemical engineering graduate from the University of Birmingham in England, I started my career in the research and development (R & D) department of a major chemical and textile corporation. The corporation gave me the opportunity to move from engineering design to artistic design in the world of textiles. I understand design from both perspectives. I progressed through the corporation to become chief executive of a leading design brand and understand the leader’s role in enabling innovation.

Today, I help companies develop their approach to innovation by sharing my past experience. I write extensively on innovation, including the Innovation Imperative column for Quality Progress.

One of the skill sets I have developed over the years is the ability to simplify complexity! I will do that in this book. I will give you an under­stand­ing of innovation in an everyday language using the framework of ISO 56002, the international standard on innovation management, and guide you on how to use the standard in a way that is best suited to your own needs.

If you are already using ISO 9001, you are in a perfect position to graduate to innovation management. The ISO 56002 standard integrates with ISO 9001. If you are not currently using ISO 9001, then ISO 56002 will give you a systems approach for developing innovation management.

Thirty years ago, the business world was starting its journey of quality management. Today, innovation management is becoming the price of entry to the business world. Research shows a very high correlation between innovative businesses and profitability when compared to their competition.¹

Join me on the journey into the exciting and rewarding world of innovation!

¹ Dylan Minor, Paul Brook, and Josh Bernoff, Are Innovative Companies More Profitable, MIT Sloan Management Review (2017).

Introduction

I had been chasing the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for several years to start addressing innovation. I knew a number of the ISO Technical Committee chairs and also several of the people in the Central Secretariat in Geneva. It was the summer of 2013 when I made my regular call to my national standards body and got the sudden surprise reply, Yes, we have an innovation committee. My response was delight, and then I got the question, Will you chair the national committee? Without thinking, I replied, Of course. Passion is one of the attributes of an innovator, and I am not short of that. My first task was to start building membership to be a representation of industry sectors. Building the committee was not easy, and a requirement of ISO is that a national committee working on a standard for all business sectors does represent a wide range of industry sectors. This is to avoid it pursuing the interests of one industry sector. My next task would be to attend the first meeting of the International Committee TC279.

The first international meeting was in Paris in December of that year, and the Association Francaise de Normalisation (Afnor) would be the national body managing the new standard. I got the chance to practice my rusty French when I bought my metro ticket to cross Paris to the Afnor headquarters. It is close to the Stade de France, the home of French rugby and football (or should I say soccer?). I checked in and was pointed to a room at Afnor where I met a lot of new faces and a few I recognized.

Representatives from each of the countries introduced themselves and were asked to flag what they thought was important in any new standard. The title for the new technical committee was Innovation Tools and Methods. I recall flagging the issue of culture, which had always been avoided in ISO 9001 and yet was so critical for innovation. Leo Colombo from Argentina was across the aisle from me, and I vividly recall him saying that an innovation management system (IMS) was imperative for this to work. I also recall reaching across the aisle and shaking his hand. Over the following years, we became good friends. This tipping point led to TC 279 changing its title to Innovation Management.

We met the following year in Buenos Aires, and work on ISO 56002 began. The secretary of the working group (WG1) was ‎Joana dos Guimarães from Portugal, who would also become a good friend of mine. We developed a design specification in the first meeting and started work on the principles that I will discuss in Chapter 2 of this book.

I’ve had people say to me, "How can you possibly have the words innovation and standard in the same sentence, let alone the same title?" ISO standards are not what you first think they are, and management systems are not prescriptive. The mission statement of ISO is:

ISO develops high quality voluntary International Standards which facilitate international exchange of goods and services, support sustainable and equitable economic growth, promote innovation and protect health, safety and the environment.

Key phrases are facilitate international exchange and support…economic growth plus of course, promote innovation. ISO operates by bringing together the knowledge of experts from around the world, gaining consensus, and then producing standards that can give either guidance or auditable requirements. This enables a common understanding between nations, which makes trade between nations easier to operate.

In the case of the innovation standard, it would probably not have been possible 10 years ago to create this consensus. Back then, there was a divergence of understanding on innovation and also the widely held belief that innovation starts in the lab or the design department. Now, there is a high level of agreement on what innovation is and how it starts. Going back a little more than 2000 years ago, Plato is believed to have famously said, Necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, innovation starts in the marketplace.

So, what do we mean by innovation? ISO gives us the definition of a noun: a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value, but many people are looking for the definition of the innovation process or a verb, and one such definition is new knowledge creating new products or services. An informal definition I came across recently was something new that makes people happy. I like that.

ISO 56000

ISO 56000 is the opening document in the ISO 56000 series, and I will explain it more fully in Chapter 1. The core standard in the series is ISO 56002, which is the focus of this book and provides guidance on a systems approach to managing innovation. In the future, you can expect an auditable version of this standard, and the number ISO 56001 has been reserved for that purpose. There are additional supporting standards in the series, such as ISO 56003, Partnering; ISO 56005, Intellectual property; ISO 56006, Strategic intelligence; ISO 56007, Idea management; and ISO 56008, Measurement. I will reference these as I arrive at these subjects. TR 56004 is a technical report on assessment, but this does not address the IMS. The ISO Technical Committee that has produced these documents is ISO/TC279 on innovation management.

The benefit of an organization using the ISO 56000 series is to give customers, business partners, funders, or academia the confidence that an organization can consistently deliver innovation.

Management Systems

I now need to explain why an IMS has become so vital. It is helpful to look at the history of quality to see how essential the systems approach has become. If you read quality manuals from 30 years ago in the days of quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA), you can sense the writer is pleading to be heard, using phrases like must and have to. Quality managers worked in isolation, and it was only when we started to understand systems at the turn of the century that quality became business as usual.

A system is a set of interrelated and interacting elements. Those elements are people, processes, and technology. W. Edwards Deming showed that 90% of the problems in a process are a result of the system in which the process operates. Linkage is everything, and, for example, if sales is not linked to design, the design people will guess what the customer wants, and operations will pick up the pieces.

Peter Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline, raised our awareness of systems thinking back in 1994. However, the earliest work on this was in Sir Francis Bacon’s scientific method and his book Novum Organum (1620), or New Method, which replaced the thinking in Aristotle’s Organon. Bacon proposed an approach of observe, plan, do, check, act (OPDCA).

In 1996, the environmental standard ISO 14001 introduced the first widely used ISO management system based on a plan, do, check, act (PDCA) cycle, and in 2000, ISO 9001 morphed from a product standard to a management system and standard, again following the PDCA cycle.

When ISO 9001:2000 was published in the year 2000, it was actually a compromise addressing both quality assurance (QA) and quality manage­ment (QM), and many countries stayed in the old world of QA. Post 2000, the ISO Central Secretariat created a task group to develop a common, high-level structure for all management system standards. This group contained representatives from all the major ISO technical committees. The result was a consensus on a common structure for management system standards (MSSs). Early users were ISO 27001 on information security and ISO 39001 on traffic safety. ISO 9001 adopted this structure in 2015, and the new ISO 56002 on innovation management is written with this same structure. ISO 56002 is preparing you for ISO 56001, which will be the requirements standard.

Figure 1 is the essential framework of an ISO management system. This common, high-level structure (HLS) enables integration of different ISO management systems. With an integrated system, you can deliver both quality and innovation.

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of every ISO standard are introductory. Part 4 is where we observe and identify the issues that affect the business internally and externally. Think OPDCA. Good innovators are good observers, and the job of leadership in Part 5 is to link the issues identified to the setting of business objectives through risk analysis in Part 6, Planning.

At the heart of the system is the PDCA cycle. Part 6, Planning, is where objectives are set for addressing the key business issues. Part 8 is the do where we carry out our business operations. We check performance in Part 9 and act on any shortfall in Part 10. At the heart of the PDCA is Part 7, Support, which provides the enablers such as people’s competence, infrastructure, communications, and information management.

ISO 56002

Let me take you into an outline of ISO 56002, the Innovation management system standard, and at the same time show some of the links to ISO 9001:2015.

Parts 1, 2, and 3

Part 1 of the standard is about scope, and in ISO MSSs, this explains that the standard is not prescriptive and can apply to any organization. Part 2 is Normative references, which indicates other standards that are essential in order to use this standard. Part 3 is Terms and definitions. The terms and definitions used in ISO 56002 are available in ISO 56000.

Part 4 Context of the Organization

A business is not an island, and it interacts with many outside forces that affect the strategy of the business. Part 4 is where the external and internal issues that affect the organization are identified. The risks related to these issues will be evaluated in Part 6. These are the first steps in both a quality strategy and an innovation strategy, and they show how the ISO 56002:2019 structure will be integrated with ISO 9001:2015.

You may have conducted a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis previously (see Figure 2) and, initially, if you have an ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS), you probably focused on the weaknesses and threats to identify risks. The opportunities, as well as the threats, provide drivers for innovation.

The strategic challenges identified in Part 4 provide the fuel for your innovation engine. Which of your products is declining? Which of your customers is going quiet? Opportunities arise when we identify needs that are not being met. These often occur because we previously lacked the ability to meet those needs. Innovation addresses those unmet needs and is critical for our future competitive edge in the market.

To illustrate this point, take a simple need. You would like a picture of yourself. Two hundred years ago you would employ an artist. One hundred years ago photographic film provided a cheaper and sometimes quicker solution. Digital photography now enables a picture to be retaken in seconds at zero cost if it does not meet a person’s need. Steven Sasson at Kodak created this technology in 1975, and Kodak refused to implement it because of its investment in film manufacturing.

Kodak differentiated its existing solution by being faster on delivery, cheaper on price, and more reliable on performance. It chipped away at the cost factors. Someone else implemented the game changer that made yesterday’s solution obsolete. We know what this did to Kodak, and if we fail to define our unmet customer opportunity and just focus on today’s requirements, our own company will have a similar fate.

Then, also part of the context, is the culture. People want to know how to develop a creative culture that will co-exist with the execution culture of quality management, that is, how to allow exploration, collaboration, and experimentation to thrive. Clause 4.4 is devoted to culture and