Who’s pulling the strings? The influence of network structure on standard dominance

Abstract

Innovative systems and infrastructures require generally accepted common compatibility standards to enable components of such systems to interoperate. In some cases, various standards are developed by competing standards organizations, often resulting in standards battles. This paper focuses on factors that affect the outcome of these standards battles, and, specifically, on the effect of the structure of the industry-wide standards networks on standard dominance. The empirical context is the consumer electronics, telecommunications, and ICT arenas. We conduct a study of 103 standards organizations from 2000 to 2011. We find support for the hypothesis that standards that are supported by standards organizations that have a central position in the industry-wide standards network have a high chance of achieving dominance.