Between June, 18th and June, 20th 2012, the 17th EURAS Conference in Kosice, Slovakia took place. The main topic in 2012 was Standards and Innovation, a key research topic of the Chair of Innovation Economics at Berlin University of Technology. Thus, four members of Professor Blind’s chair participated at the conference and gave some presentations (The slides of the presentations can be downloaded here) on different topics regarding standardization:
- Dr. Simone Wurster ( “Standardization by International New ventures and Born Globals: Success Factor Model and Specific Application for the Security Software and Biotechnology Industry” and “Development of a Specification for Data Interchange Between Information Systems in Civil Hazard Prevention – Identification of Success Factors and Challenges Based on Case Study Research and Participant Observation”),
- Mr. Paul Wakke (“The roles of firms’ motives in affecting the microeconomic benefit of service standards” and “The impact of participation within formal standardization on firm performance: Evidence from German manufacturers and service providers”),
- Mr. Sören Petersen (“The Interrelation of Strategic Patenting and Standardization in the Context of the Resource-Based View of the Firm”)
- and me, Mr. Julius Rauber, (“The Interaction between Patenting and Standardization Strategies: An Empirical Test of a Basic Model”)
Furthermore, Professor Knut Blind gave a summary on the findings of session 1 (standards and innovation) and session 2 (standards for innovation).
Within the third session of the conference with the topic „Standards, IPR and Corporate Benefits“, I presented the paper „The Interaction between Patenting and Standardization Strategies: An Empirical Test of a Basic Model“. After a brief introduction on the relation between different options to cope with innovations from a company’s perspective, the explanation of the theoretical model followed. The model depicts the decision process whether to patent or to standardize an invention and assumes that this decision relies on the interaction between reasons to patent as well as reasons to standardize. There are two main assumptions regarding the decision process outlined by this model: First, the decision whether to patent an invention (or not) is connected to the decision whether to bring this invention into formal standardization. Second, the patenting decision precedes the standardization decision. Keeping these assumptions in mind, the approach of analysis was introduced. The share of significant correlations in four different matrices of motives and barriers to patent respectively to participate in formal standardization was used to quantify the relationship between patenting and standardizing behavior of companies. The results highlight that the theoretical assumptions seem to be correct as high shares of significant correlations can be observed in every matrix except for the matrix of barriers to standardize and motives to patent. Thus, reasons not to bring in knowledge into standardization do not promote the patenting option (but the other way around) and therefore the patenting decision seems to precede the standardizing decision. The audience seemed to be quite interested and asked me to explain briefly some features of the theoretical model as well as some details of the measured correlations.
The conference was very interesting to me as I presented some research work of mine in front of international experts on standardization for the first time. Moreover, it was very exciting to get to know other scholars active in the field of standardization and to gather some new ideas for future research.
