Part 5: Putting the Man on the Moon
Read More…

Part 4: Global Smart Grid Technology

Read More…

Part 3: Developing a Smart Market

Mattias Ganslandt, George Arnold, Ajit Jaokar and Kevin Doran

Read More…

Part 2: Standards for innovation on the other side of the meter

Read More…

“There is no question that today’s structure limits innovation – as there are limited marketplaces,” says Tim Enwall, founder of Tendril, consumer energy management system innovator.
Read More…

On the 6th October 2010, the European Commission published a communication on the Innovation Union. In order to realise the Innovation Union, barriers to bring ideas to the market should be removed. Among various obstacles, it is pointed out that a “faster setting of interoperable standards” is needed. The EC announces for 2011 a “legislative proposal on standardisation, which will inter alia cover the ICT sector, in order to speed up and modernise standard-setting to enable interoperability and foster innovation in fast-moving global markets.” However, it remains rather unclear how this objective will be reached. The only concrete policy approach is the announced “programme to anticipate new standardisation needs and integration of standards into R&D projects in the research Framework Programme.”

Read More…

Last month (April 12th), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) announced the completion of its acquisition of 3Com for US$2.7billion. HP has also announced plans to build upon 3Com’s market lead in China to challenge rival Cisco’s market leadership worldwide in the market for enterprise networking solutions. The business plan’s focus is the increased use of open standards with the explicit purpose of lowering costs to consumers and stimulating increased innovation.

Read More…

Next week the 3GPP will host the LTE world summit in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the 3GPP’s (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard for next generation mobile telecommunications networks. LTE is the main competitor to the WiMAX standard, both of which are branded as 4G mobile network standards, and is capable of speeds up to 100Mbit/s downloads and 50Mbits/s uploads wirelessly.
Read More…

In December last year two wireless mobile networks, compliant with the LTE next generation mobile network standard (see the previous blog post here), were rolled out in the Scandinavian capitals Stockholm and Oslo by network provider TeliaSonera. While the LTE standard, which offers considerably faster connection speeds relative to the current 3G technologies, is widely backed by Governments and Network Providers, the TeliaSonera networks were the world’s first publically available networks utilizing the new technology and market a significant mile stone for the new technology.
Read More…

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.
Read More…