4.3. Company Standardisation

Company standardisation is standardisation within a company, including positioning towards external standardisation (Simons & De Vries, 2002). Company standardisation mainly covers three aspects - developing standards to be used only internally (within the company), developing standards to be used externally and developing standards to become sectoral or industrial standards (De Vries, 1999). The interplay of companies and standardisation can be various. Companies can be direct users of standards; they can passively or actively participate in standards development using different mechanisms of standardisation or doing both. In formal organizations for standardisation, companies can decide their level of involvement - to be represented by experts in NSBs and European or international organizations for standardisation: to comment and vote on national, European or international draft standards; to actively participate in shaping national, European and international standards; to actively develop national, European and international standards; to chair a technical committee (with the support of secretarial management of SDOs) or working groups (WGs) and coordinate the work of TCs with their respective subordinate TCs or WGs, and propose new standardisation projects.7 The level of involvement in standardisation is a strategic decision of the company. Some consortia or alliances do not accept observers or passive participants who do not contribute to the development or agreements about a solution or agree to use a solution. Standardisation is an activity that directly influences market advantages and business strategies. To expand the market for their products or services, some companies impose their solution on their counterparts in the global or regional markets and suggest it becomes standard. It might be a common technological platform or solution with a higher level of generality, which enables the interoperability of different devices and software modules and enhances the compatibility of products and their components. At the same time, core technologies or other functionalities might be kept a business secret. For some companies, it is “a nonmarket strategy, in which a company creates a business environment that is advantageous to them by engaging other companies with a clear intention to convince them that the company’s technology has potential for the common good”.8 Companies with a more considerable influence on standard setting can reduce the time needed to modify products and adjust to standard changes in advance, thus introducing new products to the market more quickly (Wen et al., 2020).