Hi,

A while back, I came across ISO 9001 for quality management. My first reaction was, let’s call it, “mild allergy.”

I pictured binders, checklists, and people proudly measuring things nobody actually cared about.

So when I later heard about ISO 56001 standards for innovation, I was genuinely surprised. Innovation and standards felt like oil and water. Creativity wants space. Standards want order. Surely you cannot have both.

But the more I looked into it, the more I realised I had been mixing up two different things: control versus clarity.

And clarity, it turns out, can be incredibly liberating.

A standard is the recipe. It does not replace the chef.

Good innovation standards are not there to tell you how to innovate. They help you agree on what matters, so your organisation stops reinventing basic conversations.

I like to explain it with a food metaphor.

A standard is the recipe. It gives you structure, shared language, and the essentials that prevent a kitchen from turning into chaos.

But it does not replace the chef.

Your teams still decide the style, the ingredients, the tools, the culture, and the flair.

That is why standards can help you evolve from “we occasionally do innovation” to “we have an innovation system.”

Two practical shifts happen when you adopt that mindset:

• You spend less energy debating definitions, and more energy building and testing real value.
• Collaboration becomes smoother, because partners and internal teams align faster on expectations and roles.

Creativity stays. Friction goes down.

If you are curious, I wrote a short blog post about why innovation management standards matter, and how to think about them without turning your organisation into a paperwork factory.

Have a read, and if it sparks a thought, just hit reply and tell me what your organisation currently has more of: chaos or clarity? 🙂

Warm regards,

Piet V.

P.S. If you have ever rolled your eyes at the word “standard”, you are in good company.