Which ISO Innovation Management Standard Should You Follow?

For a long time, corporate innovation was treated like weather. Everyone talked about it. Nobody controlled it. Leadership would say things like "we need to be more innovative" the same way someone says "we should go to the gym more." Vague. Aspirational. Ultimately meaningless.

Then the ISO 56000 series showed up and did something radical: it treated innovation like a repatable system. A system with inputs, processes, outputs, and...yes, documentation.

The kind of thing you manage, measure, and improve over time.

The problem is, you now face a lineup of standards from ISO 56000 through ISO 56008, and the natural question is: which one do I need? The answer depends on whether you're building your innovation system or proving it works to someone else.

Here's the breakdown.

Start with ISO 56002 If You're Building Your System

If you're putting together your first innovation management system, or you want to improve the one you have without worrying about auditors, ISO 56002:2019 is where you begin.

ISO 56002 is a guidance standard. It uses the word "should" instead of "shall." It offers recommendations, not mandates. Think of it as the manual you read before assembling the thing. It covers the full lifecycle of innovation: identifying opportunities, creating concepts, validating them, deploying solutions.

ISO 56002 was released in 2019 to help organizations move from ad-hoc innovation activities to a structured system. It did for innovation what ISO 9001 did for quality management. It gave people a common framework and a shared vocabulary.

Use ISO 56002 as your basis if you are:

• Building your first innovation management system
• Looking for internal process improvement across teams
• Wanting a framework without formal certification
• Developing an implementation roadmap for innovation

Move to ISO 56001 When You Need Certification

ISO 56002 was released first to educate the market. But investors, governments, and partners wanted proof. They wanted to verify that an organization's innovation capabilities were real, not performative. So in 2024, ISO 56001 arrived.

ISO 56001 is a requirements standard. It uses "shall." It contains mandatory criteria that auditors check. Here's the key distinction: ISO 56001 certification is based on the principles you've established for running your innovation management system, not on the innovations themselves. Nobody is grading your ideas. They're grading how you find, develop, and act on those ideas.

Think of ISO 56002 as your implementation manual and ISO 56001 as the spec you get audited against.

Pursue ISO 56001 certification if you are:

• An organization that needs formal external validation
• Bidding for tenders that specify ISO certification
• Seeking competitive differentiation through verified innovation capability
• Running a mature innovation practice ready for assessment

Use ISO 56007 for Idea Management

If you've ever sat through a brainstorming session where 200 sticky notes ended up in a recycling bin two days later, you already know the problem ISO 56007 addresses. It focuses on the early, often chaotic stages of innovation: how you capture, evaluate, and select ideas before they enter your development process.

This is the standard for the "fuzzy front end," the part of innovation where most good ideas go to die because nobody has a consistent way to handle them.

Focus on ISO 56007 if you are:

• Managing the early stages of innovation where ideas pile up without structure
• Setting up an innovation management platform and need best practices for idea flow
• Looking for tools and methods to systematically capture, evaluate, and select ideas
• Building a standardized methodology for evaluating concepts across teams

The Other Standards Worth Knowing

The remaining standards in the series are modular. You don't follow them instead of 56001 or 56002. You use them alongside your main system to solve specific problems.

ISO 56000 defines the vocabulary. It tells you what "innovation" even means (a new or changed entity realizing value). This matters more than it sounds. When R&D and Marketing use the same word to mean different things, progress stalls. ISO 56000 fixes the communication problem.

ISO 56003 covers innovation partnerships. If you run open innovation programs or collaborate externally, this standard gives you tools for gap analysis before choosing a partner and for managing intellectual property in those collaborations.

Our Recommendation

Don't treat these standards as competing options. They're a maturity path.

1. Start with ISO 56000 to align your terminology across the organization
2. Use ISO 56002 guidance to design and implement your innovation management system
3. Reference ISO 56001 requirements to make sure your system meets certification criteria
4. Use software like Ideanote to operationalize and document your processes, giving you the audit trail ISO 56001 demands without drowning in spreadsheets
5. Pursue ISO 56001 certification when your system is mature and operational

The standards themselves are heavy on leadership commitment and culture, the soft stuff that no software handles on its own. Consultants are often best for defining your innovation intent, aligning your strategy, and preparing your leadership for the cultural shift those standards expect.

But the operational side, the documentation, the stage-gate processes, the audit trails, that's where innovation management software earns its keep. It takes the structure ISO gives you and makes it run day to day, so your system isn't a binder on a shelf collecting dust. It's a working process producing repeatable results.

Innovation stopped being about magic a while ago. These standards are the blueprint for building the system that makes innovation repeatable. The only question left is whether you start building or keep rearranging sticky notes or excel sheet rows to run your innovation or if you are going to change your system.