Recently "Emirates Steel", the UAE steel mill, was the first steel plant in the world to obtain ISO 56002 Innovation Management System certification. So what is ISO 56002 and what does the standard say about innovation?
What the ISO 56002 standard says
Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs must "rethink" their organizations and make them more agile, faster in decision-making, fast to respond to opportunities, use new management methods, performance evaluation processes, and best practices. Thus, choosing effective innovation management systems becomes very important to future growth.
There are various reasons companies leverage innovation: increasing revenue, growing skills, reducing waste, creating added value, and so on. In an attempt to seize opportunities, companies use a variety of tools which, due to their heterogeneity, often do not lead to the expected results. The reason for this lies not only in the tools themselves but in the skills, approaches, organizational structures, and models adopted for managing the process. This is why a systematic approach to innovation management, capable of guiding the organization in identifying gaps in innovation capacity is needed.
We, therefore, enter the method proposed by the ISO 56002 standard, and as a first fundamental step, we move on to identifying an "innovation policy", a strategy, the objectives and processes necessary to achieve the innovation results in a targeted way.
We need to have an innovation management system that considers:
- Context of the organization: understanding the organization, understanding the parties involved, determining the scope of the innovation management system;
- Leadership: innovation, vision, and mission;
- Planning: innovation objectives and plans, strategy;
- Support: resources, tools and methods, strategic intelligence, intellectual property, skills, awareness, and internal/external communication;
- Operation: innovation - operational planning and control, management of initiatives and processes;
- Evaluation of results: monitoring, measurement (holistic), analysis, evaluation of innovation, internal audit and revision of the "management";
- Improvement: deviation and corrective actions.
