Technological Uncertainty and Standardization Strategies: A Coopetition Framework

Abstract

Standards may be arrived at through various coordination mechanisms, including cooperation, coopetition, or competition. This article explores how technological uncertainty affects the coordination mechanism for standardization. The article is based on the Community Innovation Survey, a sizeable firm-level survey representative of the Luxembourgish economy. The econometric analysis finds evidence that firms facing technological uncertainty will choose for standardization through competition and coopetition.

Technological Uncertainty and Catch-Up Patterns: Insights of Four Chinese Manufacturing Sectors

“…Furthermore, standardization occurs at catch-up's late stage due to high technological uncertainty. These two scenarios reinforce the proposition that higher technological uncertainty drives standardization [32].…”

“…Third, after long-standing debates among technology catch-up scholars, this study empirically defines and establishes the technological uncertainty function as a dominant catch-up pattern formulation [24]. It contributes to the ongoing discussion on how technological uncertainty affects strategic management [32], [38]. Alternatively, it offers insight at an industrial level and supports the notion that technological uncertainty influences latecomers' catch-up patterns.…”

“…Technological uncertainty, which is one determinant of the catch-up process, is also known as the difficulty of forecasting technological development [32]. Shenhar and Dvir [33] distinguish technological uncertainty as low, medium, high, and super high.…”

“…This kind of cutting-edge technology is new to both developed and developing countries [39]. Under such circumstances, organizations endeavor to compete and collaborate to standardize in order to mitigate the risk associated with extraordinarily high technological unpredictability [32]. When foreign technology or reverse engineering cannot be introduced to the global regenerative medicine industry, catch-up in an emerging economy relies on endogenous factors such as capital investments, socio-cultural support, and market and economic consequences.…”

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Standardization

“…Therefore, we make a first contribution to the analysis of the resilience of the standardization system in times of crises based on a large scale survey, which has been not considered in previous work on the dynamics of standardization [4] or on companies standardization strategies to address technological uncertainty [5].…”