دانلود رایگان مقاله انگیزه برای استانداردسازی: شواهد تجربی از آلمان

abstract

In this paper, we identify the strategic motives of German manufacturing companies in the electrical engineering and machinery industry to be involved in standards development organizations. First, we present the general motives for the formation of strategic alliances and relate them to specific standardization motives. Then, we identify pursuing specific company interests, solving technical problems, knowledge seeking, influencing regulation, and facilitating market access as motives to standardize by means of factor analysis. In a second step, we test hypotheses on the relationship between the importance of strategic motives and firm level variables, e.g. R&D intensity, innovation activities, and firm size. The results reveal that firms in electric engineering and machinery have a particularly strong interest in ensuring industry-friendly design of regulations, which can be achieved by standards. Moreover, the results confirm that small firms also from these two sectors are active in standardization alliances to access knowledge from other involved stakeholders.

5. Discussion

In summary, our research confirms that formal standardization qualifies as a form of a strategic alliance. We relate existing general motives to form strategic alliances to specific standardization motives and derive an empirically-based taxonomy of standardization motives by means of a factor analysis. The exploratory factor analysis reveals five broad clusters of motives to participate in standardization alliances: ‘knowledge seeking’, ‘market access’, ‘technical solution’, ‘regulation’, and ‘company interests’. The factors represent general motives for alliance formation, but also reveal that some motives to form strategic alliances can be grouped into more specific standardization motives. The most important objective to participate in standardization is to define technical specifications in standards documents in order to prevent mandatory regulations. This motive is followed by the objective to ensure that company-specific interests are included in standards documents, which is supported by the recent work of Ranganathan and Rosenkopf (2014) about companies' voting behavior related to new standards proposals. The objectives connected to knowledge flows in standardization processes are ranked third. The latter cluster includes the ability to acquire knowledge from undocumented discussions in standardization committees which confirms Blind's (2006) notion that standardization processes themselves represent a channel for knowledge acquisition. The knowledge seeking motive is followed by the ‘access to market’ motive, which means the opportunity of firms to open up and establish new markets through standardization, to achieve compatibility with complementary products, and to reduce barriers to trade in international markets. Finally, our analysis reveals that firms participate in standardization in order to find technical solutions