Standards can create intra-firm and inter-firm efficiencies. They facilitate economies of scale in manufacturing and promote interoperability between a variety of complementary products. In the final analysis, standards provide means for promoting stability over uncertainty, and for managing the...

Innovation, Kritik, kritische Auseinandersetzung mit "Innovation" .. "or forty years, innovation has been the hottest buzzword in business. But what if the benefits of innovation have been exaggerated, and our obsession with the new has distracted us from the work that matters most? It's hard to...

While governments as far back as the ancient Egyptians have implemented industry standards, their economic importance grew with the spread of industrialization. Throughout the 1800s, the rise of nationalism, a greater emphasis on accuracy and precision science, and the steady march of...

My dissertation is a study of standardization in four communications networks: AT&T's monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. A history of these networks that highlights standardization shows how engineers in industry committees...