China and Global ICT standardisation and innovation

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China has become remarkably active in the development of interoperability standards across many areas of information and communications technology (ICT). Such standards are crucial for the creation of new industries and markets for novel ICT products and services. This engagement in standardisation is linked to the Chinese government’s strategy to develop indigenous technologies and, in some cases through involvement in international standardisation bodies, to put China at the heart of the next generation of global technological infrastructures. In this way China seeks to go beyond its globally competitive productive capabilities to acquire technology innovation capabilities. This strategy throws up important issues for China’s technology promotion policy in terms of how to contribute to standardisation processes and of how to exploit public sector research and development. China’s involvement in the shaping of these globally significant technologies will have far reaching consequences for developed economies and global ICT markets, posing challenges for industrial strategy and innovation policies across the developed and developing world. The USA has tended to see China’s search for indigenous technologies as potentially damaging to free trade and competition. In contrast the European Union (EU) has responded by seeking to align China’s indigenous ICT innovation policies with the European Research Area. However the globalisation of innovation signalled by these developments, based upon complex matrices of intellectual property, innovative capability and market knowledge from a wide array of industrial and research players across the world, calls into question simplistic established conceptions of ‘indigenous’ technologies. These developments thus raise a number of issues – which are explored in relation to various examples of ICT standardisation and innovation.

Keywords:

• China
• information and communications technology
• standards
• innovation

Acknowledgements

In producing this special issue, we made heavy demands on a relatively small cohort of scholars with expertise in ICT standardisation, innovation and China. Their feedback made an important contribution not just to the selection of papers, but also to improving their quality through multiple rounds of detailed feedback to authors. We thank these unnamed reviewers for their sustained inputs.

Notes

The WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade requires members to avoid local standards that might constitute unnecessary obstacles to trade and use international standards wherever possible (Mangelsdorf 2011).

For example a Communication from the European Commission, COM(2009) 116, A strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game (SEC{2009}289) Brussels 13.3.2009, states that ‘Ensuring interoperability and the emergence of standards is essential to foster innovation uptake on a large scale within the EU’ (2009:9 emphases in original).

For example associated with the European Academy for Standardization (EURAS), the Journal of IT Standards Research, and International Conference on Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology.

Many of these papers emerged from the China EU Standards Research Partnership, part funded under the EU under Grant agreement no. 217457. See http://www.china-eu-standards.org

Despite the fact, as Yan (2007) observes, that Chinese players are estimated to hold only around 7% of the core patented technology for TD.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Graham

Associate Guest Editor

Kai Jakobs

Associate Guest Editor

Kalle Lyytinen

Associate Guest Editor