Causality in the world of Standardisation and Technology Innovation

Abstract

There is surprisingly little research done on something affecting us so much in dayto-day life. We therefore chose to do a literature and case analysis to answer the questions of “How do innovations in technology precipitate the establishment of new industry standards, and what is their subsequent impact on productivity?”. Causality is a central theme in this analysis. We explained the process of developing both de jure and de facto standards through innovation in technology and used the example of the Wi-Fi development process. Previous research and their focus on correlation and causality was explored regarding the impact on productivity. We found that there is a lack of causality findings between standards and productivity growth. To supplement this literature review, we also analysed, in detail, two cases. From these we got a better understanding of why and how standards develop, the important role standards can play, and the different examples gave us different explanation of the relationship standardisation and productivity growth.