There's an ISO standard for IP strategy

ISO 56005 formalizes what good IP strategy already looks like: deliberate, continuous, and tailored to the business. Here's what to borrow from it.

Here's something most founders don't know: there is an international standard for how to manage intellectual property. Not how to file a patent, how to run IP as a function. It's called ISO 56005, and while your company will almost certainly never formally adopt it, the thinking behind it is worth understanding, because it describes, at an international-consensus level, what good IP strategy actually looks like.

What ISO 56005 is

ISO 56005, first published in 2020, is titled "Innovation management, Tools and methods for intellectual property management, Guidance." It's part of the broader ISO 56000 family of standards on innovation management, which also covers things like innovation management systems, strategic intelligence, and idea management. ISO 56005 is the piece of that family focused specifically on intellectual property.

The important word is guidance. ISO 56005 is not a certification you pass or a compliance box you check. It's a framework, a distillation of practices that IP and innovation experts across many countries agreed represent sound IP management. By its own description, it addresses three things: creating an IP strategy that supports innovation, establishing systematic IP management within the innovation process, and applying consistent tools and methods to do it. In plainer terms: have a strategy, run it as a process, and use real methods rather than improvising.

Why a patent attorney finds it interesting

What's striking about the standard isn't that it's novel. It's that it formalizes, and puts an international stamp on, the exact way good patent counsel already thinks. Read through its themes and you find the same principles that separate a real IP strategy from a pile of filings. Four of them are worth pulling out.

There is no universal IP strategy

The standard is explicit on this point: there is no one-size-fits-all IP strategy. It must be tailored to the organization's specific business and innovation strategy, and flexible enough to adapt as circumstances change. A deep-tech company whose advantage rests on technical exclusivity leans heavily on patents; a company whose edge is a process it can keep secret may lean on trade secrets; a brand-driven company weights trademarks. And any of them should expect the right answer to shift as they grow. This is the opposite of the "file patents because that's what companies do" reflex.

You can't protect everything, so protect what matters

A recurring theme across ISO 56005 and the commentary around it is that no organization, and certainly no resource-constrained one, can protect everything, in every market, at every moment. The useful question is not how much IP you hold; it's which IP matters, and where. That includes deliberately choosing the form of protection for each asset, patent, trade secret, trademark, defensive publication, or sometimes no protection at all. Some frameworks built on the standard even use a prioritization matrix, weighing each asset's strategic value against the cost of protection and the risk of leaving it unprotected. If that sounds familiar, it's the same discipline behind deciding what not to patent.

IP management belongs inside the innovation process

The standard treats IP management not as a legal afterthought but as something woven through the innovation process itself, from identifying opportunities and creating concepts to developing and commercializing them. Protectable output gets identified as it emerges, continuously, rather than reconstructed under deadline pressure the week before a product launch or a financing round. That "run it continuously" principle is exactly what turns reactive IP into managed IP.

Context drives the decisions

ISO 56005 emphasizes understanding the organization's context, regularly scanning the external environment (market, technological, legal, competitive) and the internal one, and letting that reality drive IP decisions rather than habit or inertia. IP strategy that ignores what competitors are doing, or where the market is heading, is just paperwork.

What a growing company should actually take from it

You do not need to adopt ISO 56005 formally. For most growing companies, sitting down to implement an international standard would be exactly the kind of bureaucracy that gets in the way of building. The value isn't in the certificate; it's in the mindset.

Practically, borrowing from the standard means a few concrete habits. Keep a running view of what your team is actually creating, rather than discovering it at filing time. For each thing worth protecting, decide the form deliberately, patent, trade secret, or trademark, rather than defaulting to "file a patent." Tie every protection decision back to the business: does this defend something that matters, block a competitor's likely path, or add value an investor or acquirer would recognize? And revisit the whole picture periodically, because the right strategy at seed stage is not the right strategy at Series B.

None of this requires a standards manual. It requires treating IP the way ISO 56005 frames it, as a managed function with a strategy behind it. That's the same thing a good fractional or in-house patent function does day to day. The standard is useful mostly as confirmation: the systematic, strategy-first approach isn't a boutique preference, it's the international consensus on how this is supposed to work.

The takeaway

ISO 56005 won't draft your claims or file your applications. What it offers is a vocabulary and a framework for something founders often sense but can't quite name: the gap between accumulating patents and actually running an IP strategy. You don't need the standard to close that gap. But it's a useful reminder that the discipline, deciding what matters, protecting it deliberately, and managing it continuously, is exactly what IP management is supposed to be.