Rankings are becoming more and more popular in order to assess individuals, institutions or even countries according various criteria like wealth, innovativeness or economic performance. Crucial for such rankings are the selection and the weighting of the criteria. The more complex the issue addressed by such a ranking, like the innovation performance of economies, the more criteria have to be integrated and the more effort has to be invested in the development of an adequate weighting of the criteria.
Standard setting organizations (SSOs) are organisations active in two-sided markets based on a large variety of business models, which output is partly used for the implementation of public policies in national economies or supranational organisations, like the European Union. Consequently, rankings of SSO have to take these various dimensions into account. In addition, the compliance to the WTO standardization principles (transparency, openness, impartiality, consensus, effectiveness, relevance, coherence) is a basic necessary requirement for the integration of standards into the governmental regulatory framework.
However, the operationalization of the WTO principles in practice is a challenge due to the difficulties to define unique and quantifiable parameters, e.g. for openness etc. In addition to these problems in performing an objective and sound ranking of SSOs, the consequences of such a ranking have to be considered. SSOs have different functions in the research and innovation system and the regulatory framework in national economies and the global economy.
Consequently, unidimensional rankings might lead to a concentration of SSOs to the activities or requirements covered by the selected criteria and eventually to a loss of variety reducing the effectiveness of innovative and economic performance and the governance of economies. However, multidimensional rankings of SSOs will increase the transparency of the heterogeneous SSOs for their customers, e.g. technology providers, but also implementors, leading to more effectiveness of their processes and consequently products of SSOs and in the long run to more competition between them.
