The impact of standardisation and standards on innovation

In the past, standardisation and standards have often been perceived as a contradiction to innovation. This chapter provides conceptual arguments and empirical evidence that standardisation as such and standards can be used to promote innovation. After a brief section on the general economic functions of standards, the relationship between research and standardisation is examined by first showing both standardisation as a technology transfer channel and standards as enablers and facilitators for research. The chapter then focuses on the difficult but promising issue of transferring intellectual property rights (IPR) into standards, especially via standard essential patents, and shows how this can be beneficial both for IPR holders and for standards implementers. A newly emerging field concerns the role of standards and standardisation in procurement processes, which are more and more forced to address and promote innovation. In the final section, the results are summarised and recommendations for policy makers are derived.