Managing innovation with standardisation. An introduction to recent trends and new challenges

In the past, management studies of standardization have tended to focus on the macro-economic aspects in terms of the competition to establish a “dominant design” leading to de facto standards. Technical studies, in contrast, have focused on the role of Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) in defining technical specifications through a consensus among partners and competitors, users, interest groups and governments (Sherif, 2006, Saltzman et al., 2008). Our objective was to attempt to reconcile these two approaches and to take into account the micro-economic factors from a firm's perspective.