ISO 56001 is a certifiable international standard that outlines mandatory requirements for implementing, maintaining, and improving an innovation management system (IMS).
An ISO 56001 certification demonstrates to employees, partners, customers, investors, and grant providers that an organization is committed to remaining competitive and relevant.
However, ISO 56001 holds value beyond certification. Organizations can apply its requirements to establish a more productive innovation management system and avoid common pitfalls. For those with an existing IMS, the standard serves as a framework for self-assessment, helping identify areas for improvement.
Unlike traditional frameworks, ISO 56001 provides comprehensive guidance for enhancing an organization's innovation capabilities. While certification affirms a commitment to innovation practices, the standard's true value lies in its systems approach to continuously building, strengthening, and sustaining an organization’s innovation capacity.
The ISO standard provides a framework that enables organizations to:
Develop stronger innovation capabilities by assessing and improving innovation processes.
Increase innovation effectiveness through clear governance and resource allocation guidelines.
Achieve measurable performance gains through proven innovation management practices.
Rather than viewing ISO 56001 as a compliance checkbox, forward-thinking organizations should leverage it to transform their innovation potential into tangible business results. By implementing ISO 56001's principles, companies improve their ability to:
Consistently generate and capture value from new ideas.
Improve competitiveness by adapting quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities.
Foster a culture that nurtures innovation at all levels.
Measure and improve innovation outcomes.
As a member of the ISO working group, we wrote this article to provide an overview of key ISO 56001 requirements, how to meet them, and what auditors will look for when evaluating innovation management systems.
The official version of the certification requirements can be found here. Please note that auditing requirements are still being developed; this article is based on our expectations and experience.
Note: We recently hosted a webinar with the project leader of ISO 56001, Peter Merrill, where he summarized ISO 56001 clauses and answered frequently asked questions.
InnovationCast is built on innovation management principles that support the ISO 56001 standards. Schedule a free demo to learn more about how we can help you establish a productive innovation management system.
A Summary of the ISO Auditing Process
The ISO 56001 certification process begins with the organization familiarizing itself with the requirements outlined in this article, the broader ISO 56000 family of standards, and the guidelines of ISO 56002 for building productive innovation systems. ISO 56001 certification is based on the guidelines of ISO 56002.
Once the organization understands the ISO requirements, it should conduct a gap analysis of its innovation management system and address areas of improvement before applying for certification.
If the organization lacks an innovation management system, it must establish one in line with ISO 56001 requirements.
When the organization is ready, certification occurs in two stages:
Stage one: A high-level internal audit to confirm the organization meets all generic requirements. This typically takes one day.
Stage two: Auditors from a certification body review the organization’s innovation strategy, leadership commitment, innovation culture, collaboration efforts, core competencies, and validation processes. This more detailed audit takes several weeks.
Organizations receive certification upon successful completion of the audit. ISO certification is valid for three years, with the certification body conducting annual reviews to verify that the innovation management system still complies with the requirements of ISO.
Organizations Must Develop an Innovation Strategy That Defines Core Priorities Based on Their Innovation Intent
ISO 56001 states that the innovation management system must support the organization's priorities and objectives. As a result, organizations should determine what they want to achieve by implementing an innovation management system. This is known as the innovation intent.
By getting clear on the innovation intent, organizations strategically focus their innovation efforts on topics that drive them toward their objectives.
ISO 56001 recommends establishing an innovation intent by:
Keeping track of potential opportunities and threats that affect the organization’s ability to achieve its end goals. This includes external factors such as market trends and competitors or internal factors such as the organization's mission and values.
Identifying the needs, pain points, and expectations of internal and external parties relevant to the opportunities and threats above. This could be customers, employees, prospects in adjacent markets, partners, etc.
ISO 56001 says organizations should then create an innovation strategy and an actionable plan detailing how to achieve the innovation intent. They should communicate this strategy to all participants so they can focus their efforts on those opportunities and threats.
The innovation strategy should:
Detail the opportunities and threats in the innovation intent and explain their importance to the organization.
Determine the resources required to achieve the innovation intent, including financial resources, time, external partnerships, etc.
Set a framework for measuring progress toward innovation goals, including the launch of new innovations within the innovation portfolio and tracking the performance of the innovation management system.
Be monitored and reviewed by top management, remaining open to changes as new opportunities and threats emerge.
This article won't go into detail on creating an innovation strategy, but we have a dedicated guide you can read here.
What Auditors Will Look For
When organizations go for certification, ISO auditors evaluate whether they have an innovation strategy that meets the following criteria:
Clearly describes what priorities innovation is meant to address. For example, organizations may want to add new products to the product line, find new business models, continuously surface product weaknesses and improve them, or expand into adjacent markets.
Outlines the must-have capabilities, enabling management systems, and tools required to achieve these goals. This is a key part of the audit because auditors want to see that top management understands the resources needed to address the outlined priorities (more on this below).
Is open to change as new opportunities or threats arise that top management may not have anticipated. This creates a feedback loop between top management and employees. Top management details their innovation initiatives, but employees can highlight new opportunities and threats that could change the strategy.
Employees are aware of the innovation strategy, the strategy is documented, and the organization collects relevant contributions.
Our Thoughts
We agree with the ISO 56001 document that a common reason why many organizations fail to realize value from their innovation management system is a lack of clarity on the opportunities and threats they aim to address.
Instead, they create a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and ask employees to share any ideas, opportunities, or threats they can think of — essentially a digital suggestion box, as we often call it.
Most ideas are rejected for misalignment with the organization’s strategic direction, wasting time and causing frustration for all involved. As a result, workforce innovation efforts don’t focus on the opportunities and threats the organization actually wants ideas on, preventing the innovation management system from driving the organization toward its objectives.
Instead, an effective innovation management system should have a clear innovation strategy, educate all participants on the strategy, and guide their contributions to align with those key focus areas.
Leadership Must Be Dedicated to Innovation & Provide Departments with the Required Support
The leadership clause says that top management must be responsible for the innovation management system.
ISO 56001 details the following responsibilities for top management:
They should establish an innovation intent and strategy that aligns with the organization's strategic direction as described above.
They should promote the innovation management system and the importance of contributing to innovation to participants.
They should integrate the innovation management system into organizational structures and the everyday processes of innovation participants.
They should provide departments with the necessary resources to pursue promising innovations (new products, services, processes, continuous improvements, etc.) and ensure the innovation management system drives value for the organization.
They should encourage regular performance evaluations of the innovation management system to support continual improvement.
They should create an innovation policy that expresses a commitment to innovation and risk management and communicate it to relevant innovation participants.
They are encouraged to align the innovation management system with other relevant systems (e.g., environmental management or ISO 14001 and quality management or ISO 9001).
They should plan the actions to address opportunities and threats in the innovation strategy. This includes what needs to be done, the necessary resources, the competencies involved, and how results will be assessed.
With this buy-in from top management and stakeholders, employees understand the value behind innovation and adapting to change. As a result, they continuously seek opportunities to address problems or objectives in the innovation strategy.
Employees and innovation participants feel empowered to run experiments, test ideas, and take risks, knowing top management recognizes failure as a natural part of innovation. This fosters a genuine culture of innovation.
What Auditors Will Look For
ISO auditors assess whether top management is providing departments with the following:
Budget: Departments should be allocated appropriate budgets to pursue their ideas.
Time: Employees should be given dedicated time to run experiments and test whether their ideas will work.
Training: Employees should receive the required training to productively contribute to innovation.
Tools and methods: Organizations should invest in the correct software, methodologies, processes, and infrastructure to manage innovation.
ISO auditors can also assess the organization’s innovation culture through employee interviews and surveys. Are employees continuously looking for new opportunities and testing ideas, or are they too afraid of failure to participate?
That said, ISO recognizes that fostering a culture of innovation requires time. It’s seldom that an organization establishes a fully-fledged culture of innovation by the time they apply for certification. Auditors want to see that organizations are taking steps in the right direction.
Our Thoughts
In our experience, top management often struggles to get the workforce to participate in innovation efforts.
A primary reason for this hesitation is that employees believe top management is only interested in revolutionary ideas — like the next iPhone or a self-driving car. They think their ideas aren’t relevant and that innovation is reserved for engineers and scientists working in R&D.
What many employees don’t realize is that smaller, continuous improvements are the most common form of innovation. This includes refining operational inefficiencies, improving existing products and services, or resolving customer frustrations. Highlighting a small process inefficiency or customer complaint can generate significant organizational value.
Organizations that effectively address these hesitations and assure employees that their input is valued — no matter how insignificant it may seem — tend to have the highest participation rates and returns on their innovation investment.
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Organizations Need to Establish a Structured Approach for Internal & External Collaboration
The ISO 56001 document recognizes that organizations often lack the necessary competencies to develop effective solutions and bring them to the market. As a result, most rely on input from outside partners and experts — such as suppliers, distributors, consultants, service providers — to drive innovation.
ISO 56001 requires organizations to assess their competencies, identify gaps, and determine appropriate strategies to address those gaps, which may include external collaboration, among other approaches.
What Auditors Will Look For
The ISO auditor will assess whether organizations have the necessary competencies to execute the innovation strategy. They will also verify that external partners are collaborating with employees to develop and deploy solutions. This ties back to the leadership and support clause, as it is the responsibility of leadership to engage these outside partners.
Our Thoughts
We believe collaboration and co-creation should be considered from the outset: during the identification of opportunities and concept generation (ideation).
Collaboration among participants with diverse skill sets is necessary because it's rare for an idea author to submit a fully-developed concept. Since they aren't specialists in every field, they may lack the expertise to evaluate an idea from all perspectives (e.g., legal, engineering, logistics). Even the first draft of what becomes the company’s best idea is often flawed — and this is perfectly normal!
When there are no IP concerns, organizations should centralize all idea submissions so everyone in the organization can view them. Employees with various competencies can then lend their expertise to refine the ideas.
Organizations that do this successfully create a consistent stream of high-quality ideas that address both threats and opportunities in their innovation strategy. They refine ideas by tapping into the collective knowledge and expertise of the entire workforce and external participants.
Organizations Should Validate, Develop & Deploy Solutions
After sourcing ideas that address opportunities and threats in the innovation strategy, ISO recommends moving them through three non-linear, iterative stages:
Validation: This stage tests whether an idea is worth developing and deploying. Given the risks and uncertainties of new innovations — such as utility, user acceptance, market size, and technical feasibility — ISO 56001 advises validating ideas to reduce risk to a level aligned with the organization’s risk appetite through systematic experimentation.
Development: This stage involves creating a full-scale solution by assembling an implementation team and allocating resources.
Deployment: This stage delivers the new solution to the end user, typically including scalability plans, product promotion, performance monitoring (KPIs), and user feedback collection.
What Auditors Will Look For
Auditors will assess whether the organization has the systems in place to advance ideas to validation, development, and deployment, or if ideas remain unaddressed.
Our Thoughts
We agree with these ISO requirements because many organizations assume that collecting ideas alone constitutes an innovation management system, overlooking the subsequent steps — such as idea evaluation, validation, development, and deployment.
While these organizations may excel at gathering high-quality ideas, without clear post-ideation steps, those ideas sit dormant, never realizing their full potential. If this sounds familiar, we recommend focusing on this area.
This means creating workflows that define who to involve during validation, what experiments to run, and what metrics to track, among other factors. Additionally, organizations should develop distinct workflows for different types of ideas, as the steps to implement a product idea differ from those for a new business model or process improvement, for example.
Even if certification isn't a priority, establishing workflows that outline the steps after idea collection can improve the effectiveness of your innovation management system. This ensures that ideas evolve into real-world solutions rather than stagnating.
Organizations Must Measure the Impact of Their Innovation Efforts
ISO 56001 outlines the need for organizations to measure the performance of their innovation management system.
When implementing a new system, organizations should consider the following performance indicators:
Inputs: Resources allocated to idea management, including budgets, training, technology, infrastructure, and equipment.
Throughputs: The speed at which ideas are transformed into live products, services, and processes.
Outputs: The tangible deliverables resulting from innovation activities.
Results: The impact and outcomes generated by the innovation management system. While not a focus of the auditing process, measuring innovation ROI is crucial (as detailed below).
What Auditors Will Look For
To become ISO 56001 certified, organizations must identify what needs to be monitored and measured, and establish appropriate innovation performance indicators.
Our Thoughts
In our experience, most organizations track inputs, throughputs, and outputs but often neglect measuring results since these can be harder to track.
Regardless of whether organizations prioritize ISO certification, we recommend emphasizing both outputs and results as it allows the innovation department to show top management the ROI of their innovation efforts, which is necessary to continue securing their budget.
We won’t discuss measuring outputs and results too much in this article but we have an entire guide that you can read here.
Organizations Must Assess Their Innovation Management System & Introduce Continuous Improvements
ISO recommends that organizations evaluate the performance of their innovation ecosystem at regular intervals, identify weaknesses, and implement changes to improve productivity.
Evaluations should focus on the following:
Realization of value: Is the innovation management system generating products, services, processes, improvements, and models that benefit the organization?
Achievement of innovation management goals: To what extent have innovation management goals been met?
Weaknesses in the innovation management system: What areas need improvement?
Insights from past successes and failures: What knowledge can be gained to inform future actions?
Adequacy of support: Are departments receiving the necessary resources, time, and competencies to pursue their ideas?
What Auditors Will Look For
Auditors will verify that the organization performs regular self-assessments and makes improvements to its innovation processes.
Our Thoughts
Evaluation and continual improvement of the innovation management system are essential because innovation management is relatively new compared to other management practices. Even industry experts are continually learning about new best practices, methodologies, and opportunities.
Read more: 5 Best Open Innovation Software (2025 Reviews)
How InnovationCast Helps Organizations Meet ISO 56001 Requirements
How InnovationCast Helps Organizations Validate, Develop & Deploy Solutions
We built InnovationCast with workflows that guide teams through the necessary steps after collecting ideas. Our workflows cover new product ideas, continuous improvement ideas, process innovation ideas, business model ideas, and more.
This structured approach ensures ideas are validated, developed, and deployed, transforming them into products, services, and processes that bring value to the organization.
InnovationCast workflows specify core competencies to involve, risk assessment frameworks, assumptions to map out, experiments to run, metrics to track, guidelines for resource allocation, and more.
These workflows were developed from over a decade of experience managing innovation projects across various enterprises, identifying the most effective methods for validating and implementing ideas.
How InnovationCast Helps Organizations Set Up, Maintain & Continuously Improve Innovation Management Systems
InnovationCast is more than just innovation management software. With over a decade of experience as innovation managers and consultants, we are active participants in the ISO working group.
This expertise enables us to help you:
Set up an organization-wide innovation management system in accordance with ISO 56001 requirements and guide you through the certification process.
Maintain your organization’s innovation management system and ensure readiness for annual ISO reviews.
Continuously improve your innovation management system by leveraging the knowledge gained from implementing and maintaining systems across multiple organizations.
Get Ready for ISO 56001 Certification with InnovationCast
Schedule a free 25-minute demo to learn more about how InnovationCast can help your organization get ISO 56001 certified.
