New innovative systems may address societal challenges such as climate change and energy scarcity. Often, these innovative systems are realized following a set of predefined standards. Sometimes, multiple standards compete for market dominance. This paper addresses factors that affect standard competition and dominance. It investigates how the composition of standardization organizations with respect to their salience influences the success of standards by applying a refined method for identifying stakeholders and their salience. The paper contributes to the literature by providing initial evidence that stakeholder salience affects standards dominance. It appears that user engagement and the involvement of definitive stakeholders, holding power, urgency and legitimacy increases standards dominance and that avoiding dangerous stakeholders that lack legitimacy has a possible effect on standards success. These are important considerations to consider by practitioners.

Anticipatory governance supports mission-oriented innovation policy by identifying, mitigating, and preparing for barriers that impede socio-technical transformations. While recent research introduced the Mission-Oriented Transition Assessment as a formative approach to mission governance, we insufficiently understand how this approach helps govern missions over a sustained period. This study applies a ‘real-time’ Mission-Oriented Transition Assessment to yield longitudinal insights into how mission barriers are foreseen, constructed, and responded to by stakeholders. We do so in the context of the Dutch maritime mission ‘Climate neutral shipping by 2050′. The results of 14 assessments over a period of 1.5 years with 124 stakeholder representatives show how 19 mission barriers are collectively anticipated, explicated, and acted upon. As such, this paper conceptualizes and empirically explores the usefulness of a ‘real-time’ Mission-Oriented Transition Assessment as a formative approach to anticipatory mission governance.

Technological developments such as the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence result in new innovative systems. In these systems, ICT is integrated in products, services and processes. Interconnectivity gets crucial and standards should facilitate this. New standards complement existing ones and these may originate both from the ICT field and from other fields. These fields have different standardization cultures and often, multiple standards are competing. The question is which standard, if any, will achieve market success. We relate the success factors to the different phases of the technology life cycle. We assess the importance of these factors by using the Best Worst Method. In the discussion section, we argue how the importance of certain factors may change and which new factors pop up in an increasingly globalized and digital world. This should provide a basis for future research on market success of standards in this new context.

A unique aspect of standards is that they define uniformity concerning, e.g., the interconnection between system components. By adhering to these standards, companies know their products can connect to other products when integrated into systems. Therefore, a standard should not be changed, as, consequently, interoperability cannot be guaranteed. At the same time, from the literature on innovation management, we know that companies that make their designs flexible will be able to include user requirements. As a result, these users will be more inclined to choose these designs, increasing the installed base and design dominance. This paper addresses the counterintuitive relationship between standardization and flexibility. Specifically, we study whether standards flexibility will result in more successful standards regarding their installed base. We study the standards battle for short-range wireless communication between IrDA and Bluetooth in the home. The standardization process surrounding the winning standard, Bluetooth, was more flexible. This provides a first indication that flexibility in standardization positively affects standards dominance.

This paper focuses on the determinants of establishing dominant hydrogen fuel cell technology designs in the maritime industry in Western Europe. By systematically studying the battle between the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell and the Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell, utilizing the best-worst method it arrives at importance for factors for design dominance. It appears that ‘fuel cell costs’ is the most important factor: it received a global average weight of 0.18. This is the first time that factors for design dominance are studied in the maritime industry and the paper offers novel empirical material from a distinct sector. It also provides a first indication that the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell will have the highest chance to become the dominant design although the Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel cell is a close follower. The paper discusses contributions, implications, and future research recommendations for the literature on dominant designs.

In the data economy, data sovereignty is often conceptualized as data providers’ ability to control their shared data. While control is essential, the current literature overlooks how this facet interrelates with other sovereignty facets and contextual conditions. Drawing from social contract theory and insights from 31 expert interviews, we propose a data sovereignty conceptual framework encompassing protection, participation, and provision facets. The protection facets establish data sharing foundations by emphasizing baseline rights, such as data ownership. Building on this foundation, the participation facet, through responsibility divisions, steers the provision facets. Provision comprises facets such as control, security, and compliance mechanisms, thus ensuring that foundational rights are preserved during and after data sharing. Contextual conditions (data type, organizational size, and business data sharing setting) determine the level of difficulty in realizing sovereignty facets. For instance, if personal data is shared, privacy becomes a relevant protection facet, leading to challenges of ownership between data providers and data subjects, compliance demands, and control enforcement. Our novel conceptualization paves the way for coherent and comprehensive theory development concerning data sovereignty as a complex, multi-faceted construct.

This paper analyses strategies for platform owners to increase complementor participation on the platform. Specifically, it draws on open innovation (OI) and the resource-based view (RBV) to isolate three drivers of complementor participation, namely breadth of content offerings and boundary resources (related to OI), and exclusive content (associated with RBV). We hypothesize that higher levels of each of these drivers increase the platform's attractiveness to future complementors and increase complementor participation. Based on negative binomial fixed effects regressions in the context of video game consoles, we find that boundary resources and exclusive content, but not breadth of content offerings, are positively related to complementor participation. This shows that drivers from both OI and RBV relate to complementor participation. The results have implications for the orchestration of platform ecosystems.

This paper investigates the factors influencing innovation adoption in ports by conducting a systematic literature review and proposes a comprehensive framework for understanding the process of innovation adoption. The maritime sector is a typical example of a business-to-business market, whereas the information technology industry is an example of a business-to-consumer market. We show that factors for innovation adoption applicable to a business-to-consumer market are also relevant to a business-to-business market. The factors that were found relate to the adopting port’s characteristics and include know-how, organization support, organizational structure, financial capacity, a port’s network embeddedness, and risk-taking. Furthermore, they concern the characteristics of the innovation such as the costs, relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, trialability, and observability. Finally, stakeholder pressures were identified relating to the customer, competitive port, regulatory bodies, and society.

Automated vehicles (AVs) aim to dramatically improve traffic safety by reducing or eliminating human error, which remains the leading cause of road crashes. However, commonly accepted standards for the ‘safe driving behaviour of machines’ are pending and urgently needed. Unless a common understanding of safety as a design value is achieved, different manufacturers’ driving styles may emerge, resulting in inconsistent, unpredictable and potentially unsafe ‘behaviour’ of AVs in certain situations. This paper aims to explore the main gaps and challenges towards establishing shared safety standards for the ‘behaviour’ of AVs, and contribute to their responsible traffic integration, by reviewing the state-of-the-art on AV safety in the core relevant disciplines: ethics of technology, safety science (engineering & human factors), and standardisation. The ethical and safety aspects investigated include the users’ perception of AV safety, the ethical trade-offs in critical decision-making contexts, the pertinence of data-driven approaches for AVs to mimic human behaviour, and the responsibilities of various actors. Moreover, the paper reviews the current safety patterns, metrics (surrogate measures of safety – SMoS) and their thresholds introduced in existing research for three use cases: mixed traffic of AV and conventional vehicles, AV interaction with pedestrians and cyclists, and transition of control from machine to human driver. The results reveal several knowledge gaps within each discipline and highlights the lack of common understanding of safety across disciplines. On the basis of the results, the paper proposes a framework for further research on AV safety, identifying concrete opportunities for interdisciplinary research, with common goals and methodologies, and explicitly indicating the path for transfer of knowledge between sectors.