Photo by Aaron Lefler on Unsplash.
ISO’s 2025 financial results, published recently on the organization’s website, are very encouraging. The ISO Central Secretariat (ISO/CS) restored an operating surplus in 2025, primarily through financial discipline.
At the same time, the figures reinforce several arguments I made in Reflections on business model innovation in standardization. The key question remains: how can a standards body capture value when the value of standards increasingly resides not in the document itself, but in how standards are used?
