مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Firms’ involvement in standards setting alliances is attracting increasing attention within industry, among policy makers and researchers (Choi et al., 2011; European Commission, 2008). A firm participating in standards development organizations (SDOs) can increase its competitiveness by actively influencing standards towards its own preferred specializations or by passively gaining knowledge from the standardization process (e.g. Sherif, 2015). Our analysis identifies firms’ specific strategic motives related to their involvement in standardization committees and their relation to companies’ characteristics.

For policymakers, standards – the results of the standardization process – play an important role in internalizing externalities and achieving international trade liberalization. In the European Union (EU), the introduction of the ‘New Approach’ to technical harmonization aims to establish a European Single Market by prescribing essential health and safety requirements in harmonized standards. At the global level, international standards gain importance through Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Büthe and Mattli, 2011; Mattli, 2001; Sykes, 1999).

Given the fundamental impact of standardization on growth (Blind and Jungmittag, 2008), policymakers in industrialized and newly-industrialized countries recognize the importance of standardization for the competitiveness of their economies. Within the last decade, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the USA have implemented national standardization strategies (Hemphill, 2009; Limin et al., 2005). However, considering that standards are mainly set by private actors, surprisingly little is known about firm-specific motives towards their involvement in standardization. Existing literature on firm strategies in standards setting is limited to firms in industry consortia in the information and telecommunication sector (Chiesa et al., 2002; David and Steinmueller, 1994; DeLacey et al., 2006; Greenstein and Stango, 2007; Grotne, 2008; Ranganathan and Rosenkopf, 2014), on factors influencing standards battles (Shapiro and Varian, 1999), or dominant designs (Suarez, 2004), e.g., in the case of computer workstations (see e.g., Khazam and Mowery, 1994). Examples of a standards battle in SDOs is ODF vs OOXML within ISO (Blind, 2011). However, battles between de facto standards are more common, like VHS vs. Betamax (Cusumano et al., 1992 or Gallagher and Park, 2002), or Sony’s Blu-ray vs. Toshiba’s HD-DVD in blue laser DVDs (e.g., Gallagher, 2012). Only one recent case study attempts to capture firms’ different motives to standardize in formal standards setting (Riillo, 2013). To this end, this paper is a first attempt to derive an empirically-based taxonomy of firms’ motives in standardization alliances organized by officially-accredited formal SDOs. We base our contribution on survey data collected among German firms in the electrical engineering and machinery industry that participate in national, regional (European) or international standards setting processes in formal SDOs. In contrast to other manufacturing sectors, like the chemical industry, or services sectors (Wakke et al., 2015), these companies are much more active in formal SDOs (Blind and Mangelsdorf, 2013) and have therefore developed more sophisticated strategies. The focus of our paper is on the formal standardization process as opposed to de facto standardization.