International Delegates Headed to Melbourne for Innovation Congress

Florida Tech’s Abram Walton
Hosting First-Ever US Gathering

MELBOURNE, FLA. — Tokyo. Paris. Stockholm. Berlin.

Melbourne, Florida.

Next week, Florida Tech and the Harbor City can be added to that list of world-class locales as they become the first U.S. hosts to welcome the ISO 56000 Innovation Management World Congress and its cadre of international delegates.

After a reception Sept. 23 on the Florida Tech campus where they will be welcomed by university President Dwayne McCay, the 42-member Technical Advisory Group with delegates from Brazil, China, Japan, Russia, Australia, Canada and much of Europe, will decamp to a Melbourne hotel for the remainder of the week.

Hosted by Abram Walton, the elected U.S. delegate to the gathering and a professor at Florida Tech’s Nathan M. Bisk College of Business, the group will develop international innovation management system standards – known as ISO 56000 – that could make innovation predictable, measurable, and repeatable.

“What we are writing at this working event will become the gold standard of what firms and government will need to achieve in order to be internationally competitive,” said Walton, who leads Florida Tech’s Center for Innovation Management & Business Analytics and has spoken on the science of innovation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Furthermore, ISO 56000 will foster collaboration and the development of innovations, while also providing a means for bringing successful innovations to market and providing assurance to the consumer, noted Bartlett Cleland, executive director of the Innovation Economy Institute.

Walton, who is deputy editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Innovation Science, further added that the timing for these new standards is urgent, as innovation seems to be waning: more than 95 percent of new product innovations and 50 percent of product initiatives fail, and only about 3,000 of the 1.5 million U.S. patents end up commercially viable.

For more on ISO 56000 and the Innovation Management World Congress, click here.

Interviews with Abram Walton can be arranged by contacting Adam Lowenstein at adam@fit.edu or calling 321-674-8964.

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