IPR Policy of the DVB Project

The DVB Project is a European-based standards forum that for close to 15 years has been developing specifications for digital video broadcasting, many now implemented worldwide. Its IPR policy has several novel elements. These include “negative disclosure,” the obligation of each member to license IPRs essential to DVB specifications unless it gives notice of the unavailability of the IPR. This approach contrasts with the more common rule (e.g., within ANSI accredited bodies) calling for IPR disclosure and confirmation of availability on FR&ND terms. Other notable features of the IPR policy of DVB are arbitration and fostering of patent pooling. This article provides a commentary on the DVB’s IPR policy and on its application. It also describes the work of the DVB in resolving IPR “gateway” issues when the perceived dominance of technology contributors, notably through control over IPRs, risked, in the view of some members, distorting new digital markets. In two cases, DVB has created a licensing mechanism to dispel these concerns. In addition to the quality of its technical work, DVB’s success lies in its novel IPR policy and its ability to achieve consensus to resolve gateway issues.

Patents and Standards in the ICT Sector

Multiple cases have been reported in which patents have posed dilemmas in the context of cooperative standard setting. Problems have come to the fore with regard to GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA standards, for example. Furthermore, JPEG and HTML standards, as well as VL-bus and SDRAM technologies, have faced patent-related difficulties. Nevertheless, it could be argued that complications have arisen in only a small fraction of standardization efforts, and that patents do not therefore constitute a real quandary. This article assesses the extent and the causes of the patent dilemma in the ICT sector through a brief analysis of how ICT companies’ patent strategies and technology-licensing practices relate to standard setting and by exemplifying and quantifying the problem on the basis of relevant articles, academic research papers, court cases and on-line discussions. Particular attention is paid to so-called submarine patents, which bear most significance with respect to the prevailing policy concern regarding the efficacy of the patent system.

The Performance of Standard Setting Organizations

This article uses citations to patents disclosed in the standard setting process to measure the technological significance of voluntary standard setting organizations (SSOs). We find that SSO patents are outliers in several dimensions and importantly, are cited far more frequently than a set of control patents. More surprisingly, we find that SSO patents receive citations for a much longer period of time. Furthermore, we find a significant correlation between citation and the disclosure of a patent to an SSO, which may imply a marginal impact of disclosure. These results provide the first empirical look at patents disclosed to SSO’s, and show that these organizations both select important technologies and play a role in establishing their significance.

Developing a Basis for Global Reciprocity

Professional standards are a significant issue for professions such as IT and project management, where certification and licensure are either necessary to practice or to demonstrate individual competence and capability. In many professions there is no basis for international reciprocity of professional standards. This paper documents the development of a standard for global reciprocity between already existing professional standards in the field of project management. Data are based on personal involvement by the authors and interviews with participants. This discussion addresses different approaches to standardisation, how common issues in the standardisation process have been addressed, and how the hindering influence of the professional associations’ proprietorial interest was avoided. Significantly different standards of development processes have been used compared to those typical in Project Management standards development, including: an emphasis on negotiation and joint modification rather than market dominance, and an open access approach, rather than one based on exclusion and gate-keeping.

Structural Effects of Platform Certification on a Complementary Product Market

This article examines the structural effects of platform certification on the supply of complementary products. Drawing on the exploratory case of mobile application markets, the article highlights the broader market effects of competing platforms and their certifications on a platform-based complementary product market. The case suggests that platform certifications influence market intermediation, entry barriers, and deployment fragmentation. We present these market effects in a conceptual model that can be applied to understand similar complementary product markets. As such, the article contributes to the literature on compatibility standards by emphasizing some of the complementary product market effects of employing certification in enhancing compatibility.

Integrating Real Option and Dynamic Capability Theories of Firm Boundaries

Firms often acquire other firms to source technology but it is unclear why they might assume such risk by buying before a product standard is established in their industry. We draw upon real options and dynamic capability theories of firm organization to develop an integrated framework that explains why firms might acquire early and which firms are more likely to do so. We develop propositions regarding certain firm attributes as predictors of acquisition timing relative to passage of a technology standard. We argue that from a real options perspective, the primary reason firms acquire early is related to the firm’s knowledge of the technology. However, attributes such as political influence in the standardization process, prior experience making acquisitions, and how the firm resolves uncertainty about the technical expertise of potential acquisition targets are capabilities that also enter the acquisition timing decision. We provide a model based on those propositions and address how it can be empirically tested.

A Step Towards the Adoption of Standards Within the UK Ministry of Defence

This article seeks to identify the factors that have impacted the adoption of ISO 10303, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP), within the UK Ministry of Defence. The analysis presented in this article is based on Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) Theory and the theory surrounding the Economics of Standards. Using a case study approach, the results indicate that several DOI and economic factors have impacted the adoption of STEP. These findings offer insights into some of the technological, organizational, and environmental influences on standards adoption. It is envisioned that these results will make a contribution towards the body of knowledge surrounding the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of standards like STEP, and enable more effective development and adoption of these standards.

Foundations and Future Prospects of Standards Studies

The standards world has radically changed over the past two decades, especially in international standardization, with an increased impact on business and society, although the essential characteristic of standardization in general; namely, to achieve the optimal order in a given context, remains unchanged. In this article, such evolution of international standardization, caused by its structural adaptation to changes in its environment as well as the origin and history of standardization and standards, are reviewed initially. Subsequently, “standard studies” is advocated as a new academic discipline to comprehensively analyze the problems of standardization and standards from a broader perspective, transcending predominantly technological concerns. Finally, the need to invest in standards research and education is highlighted.

A Framework to Build Process Theories of Anticipatory Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Standardizing

Standards have become critical to information and communication technologies (ICTs) as they become complex and pervasive. We propose a process theory framework to explain anticipatory standardizing outcomes post hoc when the standardizing process is viewed as networks of events. Anticipatory standards define future capabilities for ICT ex ante in contrast to ex post standardizing existing practices or capabilities through de facto standardization in the market. The theoretical framework offers the following: a) a lexicon in the form of the ontology and typology of standardizing events; b) a grammar, or a set of combination rules, for standardizing events to build process representations; c) an analysis and appreciation of contexts in which standardizing unfolds; and d) logic yielding theoretical explanations of standardizing outcomes based on the analysis of process representations. We show how the framework can help analyze standardization data as networks of events as well as explain standardizing outcomes. We illustrate the plausibility of the approach by applying it to wireless standardization to explain standardizing outcomes.

Factors Influencing the Lifetime of Telecommunication and Information Technology Standards

Besides these very conceptual or theoretical approaches to deal with standards dynamics, several case study analyses exist, which focus on the standard maintenance and succession (Egyedi, Loeffen 2002) in order to answer the question how to deal with heritage relations between standards and on standard integrity (Egyedi, Hudson 2005) and in order to discuss control mechanisms that safeguard the integrity of (de facto) standards. This paper adds an additional methodological dimension to the analysis of the dynamics of standards by a strong focus on the life times of standards. The contribution of this paper to the emerging research on the dynamics of standards is twofold. First, the descriptive presentation of life times of standards focusing both on average publication years and survival times reflects on the one hand the historical development of ICT over time and on the other hand its dynamics in the various subfields. So far other indicators like scientific publications or patent applications are used to describe the development especially of new technologies, e. g. biotechnology or nanotechnology. The analysis of publications of standard documents extends the former exercises by a new more market and diffusion related dimension. Second, the characteristics of standard documents are used to explain their life times. Here we borrow for the first time general approaches from bibliometrics and patent analysis in order to explain life times of standards as indicator for their value by documents’ characteristics. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, we analyse the average lifetimes of standards in a quantitative manner, taking into account differences between countries. Since the simple approach of calculating the average lifetimes of historical standards does not allow us to include standards which are still alive, we have to apply a more sophisticated methodology, the so-called survival analysis, which was initially mainly applied in medical science. The application of this statistical approach produces average lifetimes of standards, taking into account the expected lifetime of standards which are still valid. This approach is crucial, especially for the analysis of ICT standards, because the number of valid standards relative to historical standards is rather high. Due to the very high relevance of international standards in the ICT sector and the high quality of this subsample, we concentrate the survival analysis espeically on the international standards including the standards released by the European standardisation bodies. The results of this analysis provide us with new insights about the expected lifetimes of standards differentiated by technology in the ICT area. The final step of our analysis tries to answer the question which causal factors influence the lifetimes of standards in the ICT sector. We present first insights by applying the so-called Cox regression, which allows us to identify whether some selected characteristics of a standard, like cross references or references to international standards, have a significant impact on its actual or expected lifetime. The approach to assess the importance of a technical document by analysing its references to other documents or being referenced in other documents has a long tradition in evaluating the value of patents by counting and analysing their citations. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the main results, but also with some general recommendations regarding standardisation processes and the maintenance of standards derived from the new insights.