Technical innovations, standardization and regional comparison — a case study in mobile communications

This paper studies the relationship between technical innovations and standardization, eliciting implications for an optimal role for standardization in the innovation processes, taking mobile communications as an example. An important role of standardization is to synchronize disjointed technical innovations into a systemic innovation, which creates a new market. A two-tiered approach to alleviate negative effects of standardization on technical innovations is discussed, to specify only the interface specifications between sub-systems and to define successive generations of standards. Finally, a regional comparison is made among Europe, Japan and USA on the standardization processes of mobile systems and their ensuing results.