Driving factors for service providers to participate in standardization: Insights from the Netherlands

Abstract

The paper aims to identify factors influencing the service providers' decision to participate in formal standardization at national standards bodies. The paper develops firm- and industry-specific hypotheses and tests them based on a sample of 5,812 Dutch service providers of which 174 actively participated in the Dutch standards body NEN. Our results reveal that company size, export activities, internal R&D and innovation activities are positively related to the service provider's likelihood to participate in formal standardization. Additionally, the service industry and the service type are related to the propensity to standardize. The analysis is limited to Dutch companies' involvement at the Dutch standards body and does not consider their engagement in standardization consortia. The paper combines a large and representative sample of service companies with information about service companies' engagement in standardization for the first time. The findings reveal specific characteristics of service companies active in standardization, which allow the derivation of management and policy implications.

Keywords::

• Standardization
• service
• innovation
• trade
• R&D

JEL Classification::

• O31
• O32
• L84

Acknowledgements

We thank both Statistics Netherlands (CBS) for providing us with access to the Dutch Community Innovation Data, and the Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN) for the data about companies active in their technical committees. Finally, we are grateful for the valuable comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See CEN/CENELEC (2008).

² To illustrate the characteristics of the subsample of service companies active in standardization, we have provided the characteristics of their size, export activity, R&D intensity and innovation success in Table 5 in the Appendix.