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.

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.

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.

Standards play a significant role in the semiconductor industry. However, few scholars have focused on gaining a better understanding of standardization in this industry. This study examines a specific aspect of standardization: the adoption of quality standards by companies in The Netherlands’ semiconductor industry. Multiple quality standards are available and the uncertainty surrounding that choice is high. There is a need to decrease this uncertainty. This paper attempts to accomplish that by focusing on a Dutch multinational semiconductor company that has adopted quality standards that improve sustainability. This is a typical example of a company affected by uncertainty regarding the quality standards that should be adopted. Based on a literature review and interviews with experts from the company, we develop a list of factors that influence the company's adoption of two quality standards and assign weights to these factors by applying the best-worst method. Our results show that pressure from customers, pressure from big players, management support, and formalization are the most important factors explaining quality standard adoption in The Netherlands’ semiconductor industry. Applying these factors and weights can reduce the uncertainty for companies regarding which standards should be adopted, which is the practical implication of our study.

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.

Standards are ubiquitous in contemporary society and play a clear role in technological development, organizational functioning, and business success. Standards are very diverse and often boundary crossing in terms of stakeholders and impact, but are such diversity and range reflected by academic studies? We take stock of standardization research over the past decade, considering the full interdisciplinary breadth of this growing field. We use bibliometrics and network analysis to map emergent trends, and conduct an in-depth review of the literature. In doing so, we find that management science, along with economics, is at the core of work on standardization, bridging academic disciplines, and leading theoretical development. Technical disciplines, such as engineering and computer science, supply the largest body of literature, but rarely cross disciplinary boundaries and remain rather isolated. Building on our review, we discuss current debates and controversies and distill four interpretative perspectives on the recent and current developments of standardization research. Finally, we propose a research agenda for standardization research and practice for the years to come.

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.

Mission-oriented innovation policy is currently gaining renewed interest as an approach for addressing societal challenges. One of the promises is that missions can mobilise and align diverse stakeholders around a shared goal. Recent literature underlines the importance of public participation (e.g. municipalities and civil society organisations) in the socioeconomic transformations required for attaining missions. We ask how public participation differs among (non-)mission-oriented innovation projects. Drawing on a database containing Dutch government-funded innovation projects, we investigate whether mission-oriented projects are associated with earlier, more open, and more influential forms of public participation than conventional projects. Although the results suggest that mission-oriented projects indeed correspond with earlier participation of more public actors, we find little evidence that they also coincide with increased diversity and financial influence of public participants. We conclude by discussing how policymakers and intermediaries may engage in strategies to make missions more inclusive.

This paper studies factors for the adoption of quality standards. The identified factors are applied to a typical example of such a standard; a new standardized measurement and calculation methodology for corporate greenhouse gas inventories. Standardization of these methodologies fosters innovation, as it will provide innovators and regulators in this field with qualitatively superior and more homogeneous emissions data. This will allow for the creation of better substantiated and more focussed innovations and regulations. A framework of 31 factors that determine the adoption of quality standards was first established from extant literature. The framework consists of tangible and intangible standard characteristics, standard supporting alliance, standard creating process, standard support strategy, and stakeholders. Factor weights were determined by applying the Best worst method, and interviews with experts in the field of greenhouse gas accounting were conducted. The existing literature on success in standardization is mainly concerned with compatibility standards; this paper contributes to the existing standardization literature by focusing on quality standard adoption factors. Counterintuitively, the most important factors for adopting quality standards are not related to strategic considerations or the standard's tangible technical characteristics but to pressure from customers and support from governmental bodies.

The paper provides an overview of determinants for the adoption of standards; a topic on which little research has been done so far. An extensive review and systematic analysis was conducted of the papers that have published on the topic. This resulted in a framework with 18 factors for the adoption of standards divided into 5 categories. A distinction is made between factors for the adoption of compatibility standards and quality standards. Additional analysis have been performed investigating the completeness of the list of factors and the extent to which cross-fertilization occurs by authors that study the topic of standards adoption. The paper concludes with contributions, limitations and a future research agenda.

Responsible Innovation has recently been taken up in public policies and discourses. However, it remains challenging to institutionalise its core dimensions – inclusion, anticipation, responsiveness, reflexivity, and transparency – in practice. De jure standardisation is increasingly seen as an instrument to embed the core principles of Responsible Innovation in innovation processes, because of its anticipatory and inclusive nature. Yet, Responsible Innovation within the standardisation literature is an under-researched field of study. This paper explores and evaluates the relative importance of Responsible Innovation’s core dimensions in the standards development process. We identify eighteen criteria that are deemed essential to the quality of standardisation processes. The Best-Worst Method was used to rank these criteria on their perceived importance. Diversity of participation was found to be the most important contributing factor to the quality of standardisation.

This paper focuses on the battle for a dominant design for renewable hydrogen electrolysis in which the designs, alkaline and proton exchange membrane, compete for dominance. First, a literature review is performed to determine the most relevant factors that influence technology dominance. Following that, a Best Worst Method analysis is conducted by interviewing multiple industry experts. The most important factors appear to be: Price, Safety, Energy consumption, Flexibility, Lifetime, Stack size and Materials used. The opinion of experts on Proton Exchange Membrane and alkaline electrolyser technologies is slightly skewed in favour of alkaline technologies. However, the margin is too small to identify a winner in this technology battle. The following paper contributes to the ongoing research on modelling the process of technology selection in the energy sector.

Recent theoretical advances hold that platforms comprise a second strategic dimension next to size, called identity, which describes the platform's technological and market scope. Letting go of platform size as the main criterion for platform value opens the possibility for platforms to pursue differentiation strategies with a distinct market positioning. The concept of optimal distinctiveness (OD) implies that differentiation can be optimized so that it maximizes performance. In this paper, we draw on recent OD research in and outside of the field of platforms and elaborate on the role of platform size within the distinctiveness framework. We discuss platform size and identity in the context of OD and suggest propositions for future research. The paper contributes to the management of platforms and OD in platform markets by showing how a platform's distinctiveness strategy may depend on its size. We contribute to platform management across various platform sizes and to research on OD in platform markets.

As the European Union announced the final rollout of the second-generation satellite for their Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System by 2021, stakeholders from comparable systems contemplate the potentially disrupting effects such rollout could cause. This paper explores the battle for standards that facilitate Global Navigation Satellite Systems, with the focus on GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. The paper shows that although GPS is still in the lead, Galileo is closing in. It appears that GLONASS is trailing behind. Four factors for standard dominance were most important: brand reputation and credibility, operational supremacy, technological superiority, and compatibility.

As digital platforms are dominating the digital economy, complex ecologies of platforms are emerging. While the openness of digital platforms is an important theme in platform studies, the openness between platforms has hardly been studied. This paper explores factors that affect decisions by platform owners to open their platforms to other platforms. The focus is on Internet-of-Things platforms for automotive and healthcare applications. According to the findings, platform owners make trade-offs on whether to open up on a case-by-case basis. We identify a complex array of factors relating to direct benefits and costs (e.g., revenues from selling platform data), indirect benefits (e.g., attractiveness of the focal platform to users) as well as strategic consideration (e.g., improving bargaining power towards other actors). How businesses make trade-offs on these factors depends on market-level context (e.g., maturity of the market and standards) and organizational context (e.g., strategic focus and business objectives). Our findings provide a basis for future studies on the openness between platforms, which will become increasingly important as platforms proliferate in every layer of the digital industry.

This paper analyses how the factors breadth of content offerings, boundary resources, and exclusive content explain complementor participation in platform-based ecosystems, in the context of video game consoles. Fixed effects regressions on a panel comprising two generations of consoles across six platforms show that the breadth of content offerings positively affects complementor participation. We find that breadth of content offerings, but not boundary resources and exclusive content, are positively related to complementor participation. When studied in one model, breadth of content offerings dominates the relationship. Our results show how complementor ecosystems can be orchestrated to proliferate a variety of complementary product offerings.

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.

Standardisation is increasingly seen as a means to insert ethics in innovation processes. We examine the institutionalisation of responsible innovation in de jure standardisation as this is an important but unexplored research area. In de jure standardisation, stakeholders collaborate in committees to develop standards. We adopt the anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness responsible innovation framework as our theoretical lens. Our study suggests that responsible standardisation processes should embody forms of these four dimensions. We investigate the institutionalisation of these dimensions and identify 96 factors that can motivate, hinder, or facilitate responsible standardisation. Factors were found through in-depth interviews with managers of a standard developing organisation. These are subsequently validated/rejected using surveys completed by committee representatives. The results suggest that the social desirability of standards is not self-evident. This study could pave the way for future research on responsible standardisation processes, complementing research on legitimacy, responsible innovation, and standardisation.

Standards may be arrived at through various coordination mechanisms, including cooperation, coopetition, or competition. This article explores how technological uncertainty affects the coordination mechanism for standardization. The article is based on the Community Innovation Survey, a sizeable firm-level survey representative of the Luxembourgish economy. The econometric analysis finds evidence that firms facing technological uncertainty will choose for standardization through competition and coopetition.

This paper focuses on the design of the wings used in airborne wind energy systems. At the moment, two different designs are being developed: soft wings and rigid wings. This paper aimed to establish which of the two alternative design choices has the highest chance of dominance and which factors affect that. We treated this problem as a battle for a dominant design, of which the outcome can be explained by factors for technology dominance. The objective was to find weights for the factors for technology dominance for this specific case. This was accomplished by applying the best worst method (BWM). The results are based on literature research and interviews with experts from different backgrounds. It was found that the factors of technological superiority, learning orientation and flexibility are the most important for this case. In addition, it appeared that both designs still have a chance to win the battle.