How Do Open Standards Influence Inventive Activity? Evidence from the IETF

Wen Wen (), Chris Forman () and Sirkka Jarvenpaa ()
Additional contact information
Wen Wen: McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX 78712
Chris Forman: Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 West Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30308
Sirkka Jarvenpaa: McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX 78712

No 14-20, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: We examine how standardization in the information and communication technologies affects the inventive activities of firms that do not contribute standards but potentially produce to the standards. In the context of the Internet Engineering Task Force, we find that as a technological area releases 100 more open standards contributed by commercial firms, non-contributing firms have 18%-20% less inventive output in the same technological area. This negative effect of standardization in a technological area is stronger when the standards-contributing firms hold a large fraction of complementary intellectual property rights (IPR) in the area, but is somewhat lessened when the ownership of complementary IPR is highly concentrated among these contributing firms. These effects are also stronger (more negative) on the inventive activity of small firms. In contrast, we find that increases in the number of standards developed solely by academics and others associated with noncommercial entities are positively associated with inventive activity.

Keywords: standardization; inventive activity; innovation; intellectual property rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L15 L86 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2014-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Wen_14-20.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1420

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().