Catalytic Functions of Standards

The three different areas and the examples have illustrated several catalytic functions of standards for innovation. First, the standardisation process reduces the time to market of inventions, research results and innovative technologies. Second, standards themselves promote the diffusion of innovative products, which is most important for the economic impact of innovation. A third more indirect, but important function of standards is that they level the playing field and therefore promote competition and consequently innovation. Fourth, compatibility standards are the basis for innovation in network industries e.g. for communication networks (e.g. GSM), which are increasingly penetrating our economies. In network industries, standards also facilitate the substitution of old technologies by new ones, e.g. by forward and backward compatibility, and also to allow the coexistence of old and new technologies. New platform standards are often the basis for innovation in downstream markets (e.g. GSM as platform for numerous mobile services), but also in upstream markets. Besides these network related functions, a generic characteristic of standards is that they reflect user needs and therefore promote the purchase, i.e. the diffusion, of new products by early adopters. Finally, standards set the minimum requirements for environmental, health and safety aspects and consequently promote trust especially in innovative products. Despite all these catalytic functions of standards for innovation, there are also shortcomings and problems. First, standards are the outcome of a consensus process of all interested parties and consequently represent the smallest denominator, which is often not a strong incentive for innovation activities, compared to more challenging technological specifications possibly set by governmental top-down regulations. Second, standards which are technology-specific and over-prescriptive instead of technologyneutral and focused on functionalities and performance characteristics do not create leeway and competitive incentives for alternative innovative solutions. Third, standards can also create lock-ins in existing technologies, especially if they do not specify interfaces or allow compatibility with follow-up technologies, because this hinders consecutive innovations in an industry. Especially proprietary standards of single or groups of dominant players may prevent competing technologies to market access and therefore thwart innovation

WP 115 - More flexibility for more innovation? Evidence from the Netherlands

Labor market flexibility continues to be one of economics, politics and society highly debated topic. In recent years, the impact of increased labor market flexibility on research and innovation has gained more and more attention. Previous studies have shown, depending on the measurement of flexibility as well as on the data that both positive and negative influences can be found. However, the financial flexibility in terms of wage rigidities has hardly been explored empirically. With the use of a unique dataset combining comprehensive information from both employers and employees we can accomplish variables not only to numerical and functional, but also to financial wage flexibility. In a panel probit model, we show that the influences of most of the indicators of wage flexibility are positive and vary by type of innovation. While the variables of wage bargaining has a higher impact on process innovations, information about specific wage levels, however, affects in particular the development of new products. The same applies to a separate consideration of wage bargaining levels. Aspects of numerical and functional labor market flexibility, in contrast, act negative on all types of innovation. Thereby, part time employees affect particularly processes, while flexible employment contracts have a stronger influence on product innovations. It seems that new products depend more on employment status and the resulting motivation of the employees.Labor market flexibility, innovation, wages, collective bargaining

Emerging coordination mechanisms for multi-party IPR holders: linking research with standardization

The standards setting process relies to an increasing degree on successfully integrating up-to-date research and development results (R&D). The successful interaction between research and standards can provide important social benefits. But, to do so, a number of challenges need to be faced. One key and persistent challenge is to provide the conditions in which the cross-purposes of formal standards-setting bodies and intellectual property rights can equitably be accommodated. This means balancing the collective gains to be reaped from the elaboration of a common standard against the individual gains to be allocated to relevant individual rights-holders. This discussion paper focuses on approaches to the reemerging tension between intellectual-property-rights and standards. It points to the importance that successful approaches can have to improve the interaction the between research and standardization activities. It then goes on to consider the (re)emergence of two approaches that are indicative of the changing relationship between intellectual property rights and standards-setting bodies

Global Diffusion of the Non-Traditional Banking Model and Alliance Networks: Social Exposure, Learning and Moderating Regulatory Effort

We analyze the impact of (alliance) network exposure on the speed and extent of adoption of the business model as being one explanatory factor for diffusion controlling for actor specific characteristics and embeddedness in the network. In order to explain how existing national regulation moderated this relationship and whether it succeeded in its risk-limiting mission by moderating global adoption patterns and risk-bearing behavior among financial institutions we estimate various history event analysis model i.e. standard Cox and extended frailty models. We find strong support for the role of network exposure rather than social learning, the impact of regulatory effort on patterns of adoption and the role of country clusters for diffusion in the financial sector

Evaluating the demand side: New challenges for evaluation

Evaluation of research and innovation policy faces radical challenges arising from a new policy emphasis upon demand-side measures and linked to this an understanding of innovation policy as a means to achieve societal goals. This article considers the implications for the practice of evaluation at both micro and meso-levels. It uses the exemplar of an evaluation design for the European Union's Lead Market Initiative to expose the extent to which classical approaches to evaluation are valid and where new issues arise. Some problems highlighted include the difficulty of establishing a relevant baseline, the inability of public statistics constructed in supply-side mode to capture actions, the need to engage with actors who do not necessarily see themselves as part of the initiative being evaluated, long timescales and potential wide geographical scope, measures that span from micro to macro, and blurred boundaries between implementation and impact. It is concluded that there is a key role for evaluators to become involved in co-learning and co-evolution of these policy instruments in a manner analogous to the relationship between evaluation and policy development that characterized the emergence of collaborative R&D support programmes

The impact of participation within formal standardization on firm performance

Several studies highlight the economic benefits of standards, while the benefit of taking part in standardization remains a rather unexplored mystery to date. In theory, standard setters not only benefit from the possibility to monitor and shape the development of standards but also access a wide range of knowledge sources in the standards committee. Therefore, we investigate how the participation within formal standardization is related to the performance of 1561 German companies. A Cobb-Douglas production function is estimated in order to use the Solow-residuals as indicator for the firm performance. Participation within formal standardization is measured by the number of committee seats at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN). Our results suggest that participation within formal standardization is positively related to firm performance in the manufacturing sector. In the service sector, no clear evidence for such a relationship is found. This finding also holds true when we test if a service providers’ intellectual property is well protected through patents

The Influence of Strategic Patenting on Companies’ Patent Portfolios

This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics of companies’ patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to represent these characteristics. The investigation is based on survey and patent data from German companies. We find clear evidence that the companies’ patenting strategies explain the characteristics of their patent portfolios. First, companies using patents to protect their technological knowledge base receive a higher number of citations for their patents. Second, the motive of offensive – but not of defensive – blocking is related to a higher incidence of oppositions, whereas companies using patents as bartering chips in collaborations receive fewer oppositions to their patents

Web-based multimodal graphs for visually impaired people

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Web-based multimodal graphs designed for visually impaired and blind people. The information in the graphs is conveyed to visually impaired people through haptic and audio channels. The motivation of this work is to address problems faced by visually impaired people in accessing graphical information on the Internet, particularly the common types of graphs for data visualization. In our work, line graphs, bar charts and pie charts are accessible through a force feedback device, the Logitech WingMan Force Feedback Mouse. Pre-recorded sound files are used to represent graph contents to users. In order to test the usability of the developed Web graphs, an evaluation was conducted with bar charts as the experimental platform. The results showed that the participants could successfully use the haptic and audio features to extract information from the Web graphs