Peter Merrill is leading the development of the ISO Management System Standard on innovation management; Ron Young chaired the BSI Standard committee and was part of the ISO Working Group that developed the Management System Standard on knowledge management. In this episode of Center Stage, they talk with PMI Chief Customer Officer Joe Cahill about how you standardize such abstract concepts.

They explain that the standards focus on establishing enablement systems that can be managed. “We’re not trying to hug an elephant,” as Merrill says, a system is a set of elements which we manage so that they link together. Young explained that standards are based on a set of principles of good leadership and management and contain critical success factors for managing innovation and knowledge. They discussed how organizations can evolve from simply identifying lessons from a project, to actually learning those lessons, changing behavior’s and truly deriving value from project knowledge. 

Beyond the standards, Merrill and Young discuss the value of diversity and inclusion, and the role of artificial intelligence in knowledge creation. They conclude by sharing the visionary idea that we are moving into a knowledge economy where scarcity of resources is no longer the primary driver and where collaboration begins to supersede competition.