Standards Development and Innovative Products. When should Standards be Prepared?

Abstract

Usually, innovative products came to market with no standardization in their characteristics, resulting in frequent incompatibilities among similar products from different manufacturers. Thus, it is important to have standards available to industry as soon as possible. However, if standards are developed too early, maybe products finally do not succeed in the market and standardization efforts are lost, or maybe the technology continues evolving before it achieves some stability. If standards are developed too late, then probably their impact and usefulness for industry is much more limited. Basing in the adoption curve for innovative products, we formulated a proposal about the right moment to develop new standards for such products. To facilitate comparisons, we have defined an adequate common metric scale. This proposal has been verified by the analysis of some cases of innovative products, in which we have reviewed the adoption process and the starting of the standardization activity.