In April, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the topic of formal review/ranking of Standard Setting Organisations (SSO). Contributors were asked to discuss whether such review/ranking of SSOs would foster or impede efficient standardization?

Ajit Jaokar argued that any “standards for standards” effort risked the creation of a “class system between consortia” based on an arbitrary set of criteria and will only be more difficult to apply as new innovation becomes increasingly cross-domain (e-health, Mobile health, etc).

Helen Disney, arguing that the priority of an SSO should be promotion of both competition and innovation, identified the criticism that formal review creates more bureaucracy within the standard setting organisations and as such may slow change in dynamic markets such as the IT sector.
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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.
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Rankings can usefully contribute to inform users/consumers in a large variety of areas about the options that are available to them. They can also help them to make a well informed choice. To be useful, rankings need to be objective and informative, and rely on sound methodology and data. The methodology and data used to rank people, companies, institutions, countries, etc will often be criticized. Ranking of academic institutions are for instance highly controversial. Besides the fact they are not necessarily accurate, they may also induce universities to focus on issues that will improve their ranking rather than those that may ameliorate the welfare of their students and professors. There are therefore pros and cons about rankings.
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The crux and, indeed, the most challenging aspect of standards creation is the ability of different standards to promote both competition and innovation. Today there are many different approaches to setting standards, including de facto standards set informally through the market and formal standards established by governments or standard setting organisations (SSOs). There are also standards involving proprietary efforts and those based on collaborative or open efforts.
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-The divergence between material standards and the ethereal world of ICT

We have standards for nearly everything in this green world of ours. There are Green Building Standards (LEED, Green Globes, BREEM, Energy Star, NAHB Green and ASHRAE 189 to name a few)
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After the establishment of the mobile telephony infrastructures in Europe and the US during the 1990ies, the Asian mobile markets, especially China moved into the focus of industry and policy. The policy makers in China were well aware on the one hand that the large Chinese market was able to serve as a base for the establishment of a mobile telecommunication standard as a tool for supporting the development of the national industry. On the other hand, they also perceived that the technological capacity of Chinese firms ten years ago was not sufficient advanced yet to elaborate a China-specific  mobile standard that might eventually be competitive at international markets. However it is not clear that there was a rational and concerted policy process across the Chinese government with regards to telecommunications: one would argue that telecommunications policy and industry policy were operating rather separately.
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I recently wrote a brief comment on Chinese ICT standardization (http://www.talkstandards.com/?p=1293). The political involvement touched upon in that article is particularly evident in the telecom area as this article tries to explain.
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I recently wrote a brief comment on Chinese ICT standardization (http://www.talkstandards.com/?p=1293). The political involvement touched upon in that article is particularly evident in the telecom area as this article tries to explain.
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Wireless communication technologies have seen significant development over the last decade. This is true both for mobile, where 3G technologies W-CDMA and cdma2000 have altered the way we are able to use our cell phones, and stationary systems, where Wi-Fi, WiMAX and Bluetooth have enabled device communication over the air instead of cables. Standardization has had an instrumental role in this developments (for a more extensive discussion see wirelessstandards2009-08-19final).
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Mention “competition” and “standard setting” in the same sentence and you’re likely to get a wide assortment of reactions. I offer a few thoughts on several layers of competition and how they can affect emerging standards.
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