Standards and Innovation

The Standards and Innovation report applies an extensive body of business survey data to analyse the role of standardization in national innovation performance, at a depth that has not been possible before. The most striking results are that, contrary to popular assumptions, standards of different types promote and enable innovation in the economy as a whole, even amongst firms who perceive standards and regulations to hamper their individual innovation efforts.

Standards achieve this positive impact by:

acting to inform firms cost effectively about technological opportunities and how to implement them, enabling lower costs of production and development
raising the confidence of buyers and sellers about product and service specifications and performance and thus increasing the size and growth rates of the market and supporting competition
standards as technical and market information work in conjunction with other resource inputs to innovation - investment and skills. They represent an essential glue in the innovation system of the UK.
Standards distribute established and best practice information and in this way support most types of innovation in products, services and production and distribution processes. As expected, they make less contribution to entirely novel innovations that are based on new knowledge generated within the firm or leading edge research.

The validity of these outcomes is supported by both straightforward and more sophisticated statistical analysis.

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