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Standardisation leading to innovation - advanced GSM mobile phones from Ericsson. |  tandards play an important part in ensuring safety and improving quality, but they are rarely thought of as sources of innovation. But a study of the economic benefits of standardisation by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) in Karlsruhe shows that standardisation not only contributes to national economic growth but also increases international competitiveness. The research was supported by the standards institutes of Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and some major German companies. In their assessment, the ISI researchers, together with Dresden Technical University, surveyed 700 companies in various sectors, as well as global statistics and economic growth. The team looked at many potential contributors to growth in the business sector, including the scale of production, capital employed, patents and foreign licences granted, and the stock of standards and technical regulations. They found that in the period 1960-96, 1% of Germany's gross domestic product and one-third of its economic growth were attributable to standards.
"Standards are at least as important as patents," asserts ISI's project officer Dr Knut Blind. "They act as catalysts for the spread of innovations into the market." The study found a positive correlation between patent applications and new technical regulations, especially in innovative fields.
Ahead of the game?
It can take at least five years for a standard to be agreed with industry and brought into force. In fast-moving fields such as IT and telecommunications, a standard would be superseded in much less time. At the Lisbon summit in spring 2000, the European Council asked the Commission to simplify the regulatory environment and bring in more flexible approaches to match the speed of technological change.
The Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, Erkki Liikanen, outlined possible streamlined mechanisms in a speech to a conference on alternative regulatory models held in Brussels in February 2001. They include self-regulation by industry, negotiated agreements between private and public sectors, and co-regulation - the alternative approach that applies legislative rigour to the flexibility of self-regulation. "A negotiated agreement can be considerably faster to implement and more flexible in the face of rapidly-moving technological innovations," Liikanen affirmed.
"One problem with informal self-regulation is lack of transparency," comments Blind. "We do not know what is agreed upon in industry consortia." However, as industrial sectors collaborate to set up their own standards in formal standardisation development organisations, there is a growing trend toward publication. A prime example of this mechanism is the GSM standard that allows cell phones to be used throughout Europe. It was set up rapidly by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Indeed, Blind believes that the growing use of European standards and regulations will one day limit the usefulness of national standards.
Contact
K. Blind, Fraunhofer ISI
Tl. +49 721 6809
kb@isi.fhg.de
http://www.isi.fhg.de/ |
STANDARDISATION
