TY - JOUR

T1 - Acceptance of Chinese latecomers' technological contributions in international ICT standardization

T2 - The role of origin, experience and collaboration

AU - Schott, Lennart

AU - Schaefer, Kerstin J.

N1 - Funding Information: The project received funding from Leibniz University Hannover within the framework of the Leibniz Young Investigator Grant (LYIG-06-2019-11). Acknowledgments: First and foremost, we would like to thank the participants of the Second Annual Empirical Research Conference on Standardization and the 25th EURAS Annual Standardisation Conference for their helpful feedback and numerous comments on previous versions of this paper. Furthermore, we would like to thank Davide Rigo, Louis Knüpling, Kerstin Nolte, Balkrishna Rao and Teresa Dickler for the fruitful and profound discussions, as well as Joy Ramos-Gonzalez and Christian- Martin Czypull for professional language editing. On a final note, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable suggestions for improvement of this work.

PY - 2023/1

Y1 - 2023/1

N2 - As technical standards are an important part of China's industrial transformation towards an innovation-driven economy, Chinese organizations have started to deploy substantial resources in recent years to take on a leading role in international ICT standardization. However, many Chinese organizations experience, similar to other latecomers to standardization, limited success when contributing to standardization processes, a phenomenon also referred to as the standardization gap. The literature on standardization to date has paid little attention to how Chinese latecomers enter and influence international standardization processes that have traditionally been shaped by organizations from industrialized countries. We therefore analyze the country-of-origin effect as well as factors such as experience and collaboration for successful contributions of Chinese organizations to standards. Using data from the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and binary logistic regression analysis, we are able to show that, in our sample, contributions from Chinese latecomers are significantly less likely to be accepted than those from more established actors from industrialized economies. Moreover, our findings indicate that experience is closely associated with success in international ICT standardization, but not moderated by national origin. Therefore, Chinese latecomers might not be able to catch up if they move at the same pace as established competitors. They need to find a way to leapfrog extensive development steps, narrow the standardization capability gap, and thus strengthen their participation and influence. One way to do so might be through strategic collaboration, as our results suggest that Chinese organizations benefit more from collaborating with organizations from more established regions than vice versa, on which we call for further research to establish the causal mechanisms.

AB - As technical standards are an important part of China's industrial transformation towards an innovation-driven economy, Chinese organizations have started to deploy substantial resources in recent years to take on a leading role in international ICT standardization. However, many Chinese organizations experience, similar to other latecomers to standardization, limited success when contributing to standardization processes, a phenomenon also referred to as the standardization gap. The literature on standardization to date has paid little attention to how Chinese latecomers enter and influence international standardization processes that have traditionally been shaped by organizations from industrialized countries. We therefore analyze the country-of-origin effect as well as factors such as experience and collaboration for successful contributions of Chinese organizations to standards. Using data from the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and binary logistic regression analysis, we are able to show that, in our sample, contributions from Chinese latecomers are significantly less likely to be accepted than those from more established actors from industrialized economies. Moreover, our findings indicate that experience is closely associated with success in international ICT standardization, but not moderated by national origin. Therefore, Chinese latecomers might not be able to catch up if they move at the same pace as established competitors. They need to find a way to leapfrog extensive development steps, narrow the standardization capability gap, and thus strengthen their participation and influence. One way to do so might be through strategic collaboration, as our results suggest that Chinese organizations benefit more from collaborating with organizations from more established regions than vice versa, on which we call for further research to establish the causal mechanisms.

KW - 3GPP

KW - China

KW - ICT

KW - Latecomers

KW - Standardization

KW - Standardization capabilities

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85140337771&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.respol.2022.104656

DO - 10.1016/j.respol.2022.104656

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85140337771

VL - 52

JO - Research policy

JF - Research policy

SN - 0048-7333

IS - 1

M1 - 104656

ER -