Economy & Business, Volume 12, 2018

Abstract: It is hardly necessary to draw attention to the importance of innovation. Today it is obvious to everyone that staying in the competition without innovations and continuous developments is impossible. It is not always the most radical solutions that can lead to success, since often the smaller, step-by-step, time-consuming innovations can also provide a competitive edge to the enterprises. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, emphasized it too that these days nobody needs to be convinced about the significance of innovation, but the big question is how to innovate. It is a lot harder to answer this question, because there is no consensus with regard to the definition, content or methods of innovation. Whether to carry out innovations or not is indeed not the point anymore for the economic operators in the 21st century. The questions of how to manage innovation processes more successfully and being able to find a standardization system that could turn the innovation processes of the enterprises to be even more effective are much more relevant. The answer arrived a few years ago in the form of the CEN/TS innovation management standard, which is still unknown to most of the Hungarian enterprises. The new standardization system tries to provide framework methods to the economic operators in seven chapters about how to make the management of the innovation processes more efficient. Similarly to the ISO standardization system, CEN/TS endeavours to create more uniform interpretative and methodological frameworks in order to make the definition, management and measurement of innovation easier for everybody. This study wishes to briefly introduce the importance of innovation management in the enterprises and the contents of the chapters of the CEN/TS innovation management system.