Recent Research
Networked Organisations
REsearch into STandards and Standardisation
An FP6 IST Project
Overall Project Scope
The project NO-REST (Networked
Organisations REsearch into STandards and Standardisation)
aims to investigate the applicability and dynamics of standards
in the e-business and e-government sectors, and to develop tools
for the assessment of their performance, and of the impact they
have on networked organisations.
Activities
NO-REST will look at the application of standards, and will
analyse how standards, and their implementations, are subject
to change incurred by the environment within which they are implemented.
The project will then devise an analytical framework for a causal
model of such changes. This, in turn, will help understand the
nature of these changes and will allow for the formulation of
adequate counter-measures or even better for the derivation
of conclusions for developing standards in the future and possible
mechanisms to feed back these changes continuously into dynamic
standards building.
The project will also analyse the various standards setting organisations,
with a focus on how they react to and influence the
dynamics of the environment within which they work. This will
also include an analysis of the relation between the 'credibility'
of a standards setting organisation, i.e., to which extent does
the origin of a standard influence its viability in the market
place. The project will then establish if, and how, a standard's
origin affects its performance, and will set up guidelines helping
those who wish to create a standard decide which standards setting
organisation to select.
Finally, based on the above, NO-REST will develop, and apply,
a methodology to help assess the performance of standards ex post
and ex ante. This will ultimately contribute to guidelines and
tools to evaluate the various impacts of standards.
For further information please visit the NO-REST web site at www.no-rest.org.
INTEREST - INTEgrating Research
and STandardisation
an FP6 'Policy Oriented Research' Project
Standards may be considered as a link between R&D and various
fields of policy, like innovation, trade and environmental policies.
INTEREST aims to support Community policies by improving the interface
between research and standardisation. To this end, the project
will develop best-practice guidelines for researchers, SDOs, and
policy makers on how the knowledge transfer from research to standardisation
should be supported, and accomplished, in different environments
respective technologies.
Work will start with a thorough survey of the state-of-the-art
of the interface between research and standardisation. Then, the
rationales and incentives schemes that currently exist within
the research communities and their contacts to standardisation
bodies and industry will be collected through a survey-based study.
This will also reveal any co-operation patterns (or the lack thereof).
Furthermore, following an indicator based approach, INTEREST will
develop a two-dimensional matrix linking the science and technology
base of companies (e.g. their patent portfolios) and their standardisation
activities.
Through case studies the project will analyse the internal organisational
structure of the interface between research and the standards
department within companies. Thus, solutions and organisational
models can be identified suitable to support the transfer of research
results into standards, and/or to appropriate results from research
institutions in order to transpose them into standards. In addition,
the project will analyse the pros and cons of patent pools as
a means to reduce complex IPR-related problems within standardisation
processes.
Based on these new insights, a taxonomy will be developed to characterise
the typical relationships of the two dimensions. This taxonomy
will be the basis to identify relevant combinations between R&D
and standardisation and and to develop specific policies. A final
workshop with stakeholders will discuss and validate the results.
For further information see www.interest-fp6.org.
Some Past Research
For the outcome of some earlier research please also see my list of publications.
Earlier projects perhaps worth mentioning include ParcelCall, also co-funded by the European Commission under their IST programme. Here, I tried to keep the CEN/ISSS Workshop MEET (Multimodal End-to-End Tracking & tracing) on track.
More recently, there was also a small project on SMEs and standardisation, funded by the EU's DG Enterprise.