Most organizations have no shortage of ideas. What they lack is a structured way to figure out which ones are worth pursuing. ISO 56007 fixes that.

Every organization I've worked with has the same problem. Ask people for ideas and you'll get hundreds. Ask which ones to build and the room goes quiet. Or worse, the loudest person wins.

The "fuzzy front end" of innovation, the messy stretch between noticing a problem and deciding to solve it, is where most good ideas go to die. They get lost in email threads, buried in spreadsheets, or killed by committee before anyone tests whether they'd work.

Published in 2023 as part of the ISO 56000 family, ISO 56007 gives organizations a global standard for structuring this early phase. It covers the tools and methods for managing opportunities and ideas. And it draws a clear line: ISO 56007 handles everything up to the point where you decide to develop something. The actual building? That's ISO 56002.

When You Need This Standard

ISO 56007 is a guidance standard. It doesn't tell you what to innovate. It tells you how to handle the flow of raw ideas so you don't waste time and money on the wrong ones.

You need it when your pipeline is full of noise. When your team generates lots of ideas but struggles to separate the strong ones from the weak. When you're drowning in submissions and nobody agrees on how to evaluate them.

You also need it when you're working across teams or with external partners. Open innovation sounds great until two organizations realize they have completely different definitions of "validated idea." ISO 56007 gives everyone a shared framework.

The standard applies to organizations of all sizes. Startups, mid-size companies, enterprises. It works for incremental improvements and for radical bets. The point is to reduce uncertainty before you commit serious resources.

Key distinction: ISO 56007 stops at selection for development. It doesn't cover building or launching. That boundary matters because it keeps the standard focused on the part most organizations get wrong.

How to Get Started

Implementing ISO 56007 means moving away from ad-hoc brainstorming and toward a disciplined front-end process. Three steps get you there.

1. Define Your Innovation Intent

Before you collect a single idea, get clear on why you're innovating. ISO 56007 emphasizes preparing for front-end activities by establishing terms of reference and understanding the drivers behind your innovation efforts. This ensures ideas address specific strategic gaps instead of arriving as random suggestions with no connection to your goals.

2. Establish Governance for the Fuzzy Front End

Someone has to own the flow of ideas. Decide who reviews submissions. Set the criteria for moving an idea from rough concept to validated proposal. Make leadership explicitly state how much risk is acceptable. Without governance, the process drifts back toward whoever shouts loudest.

3. Run a Gap Analysis

Look at how you handle ideas today and compare it to the standard. Do you have a step for identifying opportunities before generating ideas? Do you validate concepts before committing to full development? Most organizations have gaps in at least one of these areas. Finding them tells you where to focus first.

The ISO 56007 Framework: Three Activity Zones

The standard describes a non-linear, iterative process with three activity zones. They feed into one another to produce viable innovation concepts.

1. Identification (Spotting Opportunities)

Innovation starts with identifying opportunities, not ideas. This means scanning for trends, market shifts, and unmet customer needs using strategic intelligence (aligned with ISO 56006). It means defining the problem or opportunity area clearly enough that everything downstream stays focused.

2. Concept Creation

Once you've defined an opportunity, generate ideas and develop them into concepts. Use methods like brainstorming or design thinking for ideation. Then add the details: value propositions, feasibility estimates, potential impact. ISO 56007 is clear that an idea has to be developed enough to be testable before it moves forward.

3. Validation (Testing and Selection)

This is where ISO 56007 earns its keep. The standard requires rigorous testing before development begins. Run experiments to validate assumptions about value, usability, and feasibility. Then apply transparent criteria to decide which concepts move to the development phase. This prevents the resource drain of building on weak foundations.

Why Software Matters for ISO 56007

The standard requires documented information and systematic processes. Spreadsheets and email threads don't hold up. You need tools built for this.

Centralizing Opportunities and Ideas

Platforms like Ideanote and Wazoku provide a single workspace for collecting ideas from internal and external sources. This satisfies the ISO requirement for a structured approach to capturing input. When every idea lives in one place, nothing falls through the cracks and teams stop duplicating effort.

Automating the Workflow

ISO 56007 dictates that ideas move through phases. The right software lets you configure workflows that mirror the framework: Identify, Validate, Develop. Tools like InnovationCast and Planbox allow custom stage configurations, ensuring no steps get skipped. Automated routing sends ideas to the right subject-matter experts based on content tags.

AI-Driven Validation and Analysis

For the Concept Creation and Selection phases, AI adds serious leverage. Clustering and deduplication features (like Ideanote's AI Idea Linking) identify duplicate ideas and merge redundant submissions into stronger, single concepts. AI scoring provides preliminary assessments on feasibility and impact, helping teams filter high volumes of submissions without bottlenecks.

Strategic Alignment

Some platforms focus on the context and opportunity identification aspects by integrating environmental scanning and trend management. This ensures the ideas entering your system connect to external strategic intelligence, a requirement for ISO 56007's Identification phase.

What This Adds Up To

ISO 56007 takes idea management from a loose creative exercise to a structured business process. The three-zone framework, Identification, Concept Creation, and Validation, reduces the risk of failure in later development stages by catching weak ideas early.

The standard gives you the methodology. Innovation management software gives you the infrastructure. Together, they turn the fuzzy front end of innovation into a repeatable system that delivers validated, high-value concepts ready for development.

For organizations preparing for the broader ISO 56001 certification requirements, adopting ISO 56007 is a practical first step toward professionalizing your innovation capability.