Operationalizing Industry 6.0 for Innovation Management: A Generative Governance Framework for Distributed Autonomy

The term Industry 6.0 is increasingly used in discussions of emerging industrial paradigms, yet much of the literature still defines it through enabling technologies, future scenarios, or broad normative aspirations. At the same time, research on standardized innovation management systems shows that systematic management can strengthen innovation capability, ambidexterity, openness, and performance, but it does not fully address how distributed human-machine agency and ecosystem interdependence should be governed over time. This conceptual study develops a Generative Governance Framework for Industry 6.0 using a model-building research design and a purposive comparative synthesis of 40 substantive sources across institutional and standardization documents, Industry 6.0 literature, innovation-management and organization research, and prior conceptual work. An abductive derivation identifies six interdependent governance functions: directionality, option preservation, traceable distributed agency, embedded safeguards, recursive learning and reconfiguration, and ecosystem coherence and legitimacy. The framework distinguishes these governance mechanisms from generative capacity, treated as a higher-order outcome concerning the preservation and regeneration of future value-creating possibilities. Six propositions specify conditional, mediating, and moderating relationships that can be empirically tested. The paper contributes to innovation management by positioning ISO 56001 and related standards as systematic management infrastructure while specifying the additional trajectory-level governance mechanisms required when innovation operates under distributed autonomy, uncertainty, and ecosystem dependence.