Standardization in a Digital and Global World: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

Standardization is now becoming central to the innovation strategy of companies and governments because of the advance of both digitalization and the globalization of innovation. Big data-driven digitalization is where the firms create and capture value using the seemingly infinite data from a current generation of four billion mobile device users engaged in digital interactions and transactions . This digital vortex has already engulfed the industries, such as travel, music, retail, banking, and media, but now more traditional industries are also impacted, including energy, health care, agriculture, etc.. By 2020, digitalization will have disrupted more than 80% of the industries at least in developed countries . Meanwhile, the increased globalization of business in the last decades has had a disruptive effect on industries. There has been a multiplication of players and the apparition of successful competitors from various parts of the planet, and the demise of some traditional companies from the western world. In the rest of this introductory article, we discuss how the standards emerge from an interaction between three main sources, the standards standard-setting organizations (SSOs), the competitive market forces, and the government. We present a framework that highlights how these sources differ and work together to shape the standardization in a digital and global context. Also, using this framework, we introduce the contribution of each article of this issue and their contribution to some of the major issues that the standardization is facing today in a digital and global world. We conclude with the suggestions of avenues for future research on this topic