Standards help researchers bring their innovation to the market and give credibility over the development of an innovative technology, and start-ups and spin-offs to scale up their business. The CEN and CENELEC Innovation Plan aims at addressing venture capital investors by highlighting the benefit of standards. For venture capitalists that invest in risky innovative business, it is crucial to assess the scalability potential of the businesses they are funding. From their perspective, seeing innovative technologies that are developed with the support of standards can reduce the risk for the companies in which they invest.

Bitmovin is a successful example of a start-up that managed to scale-up thanks to standardization. The company was started as a spin-off from research at the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria. Bitmovin’s founders were involved very early in the standardization process of a new video technology and they co-created the MPEG-DASH standard, adopted as ISO/IEC 23009-1. Here you can watch the video success story of Bitmovin.

Standards have a fundamental value in supporting and mainstreaming research and innovation. Yet, this value is very often misunderstood or underrated, also by policy makers – with very serious consequences for the ability of innovation ecosystems to scale up. This issue is at the heart of a new study published by Alfred Radauer, Driving from the Fringe into Spotlight: the underrated role of standards and standardization in RTDI policy and evaluation.

The study, which was published in the November 2020 issue of the fteval Journal for Research and Technology Policy Evaluation, tackles this issue through a lot of practice-based analysis and provides a series of recommendations to improve the situation. In particular, the paper points out that, while attempts are being made to bridge the gap between the two world of standardization and research, it is also clear that more spotlight on the standards topic is needed to reap the potential benefits when innovating and supporting innovation. Based on this, Mr Radauer presents a series of recommendations, both for researchers and policy makers.