The Role of the Individual in ICT Standardisation

This chapter discusses the influence individuals have in the ICT standards development process. The chapter draws upon ideas underlying the theory of the Social Shaping of Technology (SST). Looking through the SST lens, a number of non-technical factors that influence ICT standards development are identified. A literature review on the role of the individual in ICT standards setting and a case study of the IEEE 802.11 Working Group (WG) show that in a standards body's WG, the backgrounds, skills, attitudes, and behaviour of the individual WG members are crucially important factors. Yet, the case study also shows that in most cases employees tend to represent the ideas and goals of their respective employer. The chapter observes that the non-technical factors are ignored all too often in the literature. It argues that a better understanding of the impact and interplay of these factors, specifically including the skills and attitudes of the WG members, will have significant implications both theoretical and managerial.

Standards Development as Hybridization and Capacity Building

While users in the rest of the world have been offered 3G mobile phones based on either the CDMA2000 or W-CDMA standards, users in China have the additional option of using phones based on the TD-SCDMA standard. As a technology largely developed by Chinese actors and only implemented in China, TD-SCDMA has been seen as an “indigenous innovation” orchestrated by the Chinese government and supported by Chinese firms. China's support for TD-SCDMA was widely viewed in the West as a ploy to keep the “global” 3G standards, W-CDMA and CDMA2000, out of China, but in 2009, the Chinese government licensed the operation of all three standards. The authors argue that Chinese support for TD-SCDMA, rather than being a defensive move, was a proactive policy to use the TD-SCDMA standard to develop Chinese industrial capacity, which could then be fed back into the global processes developing later generations of telecommunications standards. Rather than being an indigenous Chinese technology, TD-SCDMA's history exemplifies how standards and the intellectual property and technological know-how embedded in them lead to a complex hybridization between the global and national systems of innovation.

Assessing IPR Disclosure within Standard Setting

As part of its “policy project to examine the legal and policy issues surrounding the problem of potential patent ‘hold-up' when patented technologies are included in collaborative standards,” the Federal Trade Commission held an all-day workshop on June 21, 2011. The first panel of the day focused on patent disclosure rules intended to encourage full knowledge of patents “essential” for a standard and therefore to prevent patent ambush. When patents are disclosed after a standard is defined, the patent holder may have enhanced bargaining power that it can exploit to charge excessive royalties (e.g., greater than the value the patented technology contributes to the product complying with the standard). In this chapter, the authors present a case study on patent disclosure within the ICT sector. Specifically, they take an empirical look at the timing of patent disclosures within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the body responsible for some of the world's most prevalent mobile telephony standards. They find that most members officially disclose their potentially relevant patents after the standard is published, and sometimes considerably so. On the other hand, the authors also find that the delay in declaring patents to ETSI standards has been shrinking over time, with disclosures occurring closer to (although for the most part still after) the standard publication date for more recent standard generations as compared to earlier ones. This latter finding coincides with ETSI policy changes, suggesting that standards bodies may be able to improve patent disclosure with more precise rules.

Responsible Innovation and Standard Selection

This chapter discusses the notion of “responsible innovation” and “value sensitive design”. It applies these notions to standardization and more specifically to standard selection. Based on earlier research (Van de Kaa, 2013; Van den Ende, Van de Kaa, Den Uyl, & De Vries, 2012), it is proposed that standards should be flexible to facilitate changes related to ethical and societal values. An acceptable standard can be achieved by involving users in the standard development process. The understanding of standardization and standard selection in particular can be improved by incorporating concepts and theories from the discipline of philosophy. This chapter discusses three conceptualizations of standard selection: market dominance, socio-political acceptance, and acceptability.

How to Implement Standardization Education in a Country

This chapter explores how standardization education can be implemented at the national level. Previous studies form the main source for the chapter. This research shows that implementation of standardization in the national education system requires a national policy, a long-term investment in support, and cooperation between industry, standardization bodies, academia, other institutions involved in education, and government. The approach should combine bottom-up and top-down. The chapter is new in combining previous findings to an underpinned recommendation on how to implement standardization education.

Development of a Specification for Data Interchange between Information Systems in Public Hazard Prevention

Standards and specifications for public security are missing in many technical aspects as well as the areas of communication protocols and security management. Several technology management research gaps related to this field exist, particularly regarding R&D stage standardisation. This chapter gives insight into the development of a specification (DIN SPEC) for the protection of transportation infrastructure based on civil security research results. Besides providing practical examples for activities related to the popular standardization strategy framework of Sherif, Jakobs, and Egyedi (2007), the chapter suggests its extension. Standardisation challenges and solutions are also unveiled. The chapter finishes by outlining key aspects that may influence the adoption of the specification. Fields of application of the findings include, in particular, fast track standardisation procedures with voluntary implementation of the results, the standardisation of R&D results, and standardisation projects among small groups.

Standards for ICT

This chapter analyzes standardization of mobile phone chargers to explore the role that compatibility standards might play in mitigating the negative impact of ICT on the environment. Building on insights gained from the economics of standards literature, the authors explore how the inherent effects of compatibility standards—such as reducing variety, avoiding lock-in, and building critical mass—can have positive implications for the environment. They argue that current standardization literature and policy have overlooked this important (side) effect of compatibility standards. Excessive diversity and incompatibilities in ICT generate e-waste, discourage re-use, and make recycling economically unviable; the authors, therefore, develop an economic-environmental framework for analyzing sustainability effects of compatibility standards and apply it to the case of mobile phone chargers. They conclude that well-targeted compatibility standardization can be equated to ecodesign at sector level and should be considered as an eco-effective strategy towards greening the IT industry.

Industry-Led Standardization as Private Governance?

Industry-led technical standardization is often cited as an example for private governance. And the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project is often presented as a particularly successful case of such governance without government. The successes of the industry-led DVB Project have often been cited as evidence for the superior governance capacity of private industry. While the commercial and engineering success of the DVB Project is unequivocal, this chapter raises the question whether it has been equally successful in governing a complex sector that is confronted by a range of market failures, with direct implications for important public policy objectives such as media pluralism and diversity.

Infrastructural Innovation and Generative Information Infrastructures

This chapter addresses issues related to how to enable the broadest possible innovative activities by infrastructural technology design. The authors focus on the development of high-level services based on mobile telecommunication technologies that for matters of simplicity are termed the development of a Mobile Internet. The focus of the analysis is how features of the technology itself enable or constrain innovations. The authors do this by looking on a few embryos of the Mobile Internet (primarily the Norwegian CPA platform, but also two pre-CPA platforms in Norway and Japan's i-mode) through the concepts of end-to-end architecture, programmability of terminals, and generativity. This analysis illustrates that the change from closed infrastructures like MobilInfo and SMSinfo to more open ones like CPA and i-mode increased the speed and range of innovation substantially. At the same time, the differences between CPA and i-mode regarding programmability of terminals and the billing service provided by the CPA network enabling the billing of individual transactions also contributed to basically the same speed and range of innovations around CPA as i-mode in spite of the huge differences in investments into the networks made by the owners. However, the analysis also points out important differences between the Internet and the existing Mobile Internet regarding technological constraints on innovations. It points out important ways in which powerful actors' strategies inhibit innovations, and how they embed their strategies into the technology and, accordingly, create technological barriers for innovation.

The Evolution and Specialization of IETF Standards

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification documents corpus spans three decades of Internet standards production. This chapter summarizes the results of an exploratory study on this corpus for understanding how this system of standards and its production have evolved in time. This study takes an alternative perspective, which considers a system like IETF as an organization itself, rather than a constellation of extra-organizational activities. Thus, how it works and evolves are examined with respect to its endogenous dynamics rather than by taking it as a system, which responds to requirements coming from the external environment. The author conducts a longitudinal examination of several features of these documents, their authorship, their dependency and collaboration network structure, and topics. They present a review of how the standards corpus evolves into specialized subsystems and a commentary of findings towards monitoring and managing such standardization processes.