11: Standardisation and regulation for governing research, technology, and innovation for better worlds (Knut Blind, Jaime Bonnin Roca, Astor Nummelin Carlberg, Jussi Heikkilä, Jarno Hoekman, Kai Jakobs, Paul Moritz Wiegmann)
Standards and regulation impact the rate and direction of technological progress and innovation. They have several economic functions, but also impact beyond that. Their economic functions have been in the focus of early research. More recent work has extended the range of their impacts to be investigated to broader implications for society, including, e.g. health, environment, and security, and, in fact, virtually all the Sustainable Development Goals. Many of these impact dimensions relate to policy goals to which regulators are paying increasing attention. Regulation and standardisation should therefore be seen in the context of broader institutional frameworks, within synergies and trade-offs between different goals of regulation and standards to address societal challenges (e.g. protecting health and the environment versus stimulating innovation) take centre stage as well as questions of how to balance the use of regulation as hard laws versus standards as relatively ‘soft laws’. Whereas standards generally have a voluntary character in the United States, many are mandatory in several Asian countries. The European Union links European standards to its regulatory framework. In addition, the interactions between standardisation and regulation may well change over time. Regulations and standards are thus intertwined and their various impact dimensions have implications for our ability to create a better world. By defining rules of the game that impact innovation incentives as well as diffusion of innovations, both regulation and standards impact the rate and direction of technological progress. Research should, therefore, focus on their interactions considering the evolving institutional frameworks at national or global level. Furthermore, the interfaces to further national and EU-level innovation policy instruments, like R&D policies or public procurement, should be considered. Finally, the implications of these instruments and their interactions for the capacities and roles of regulatory agencies, standardising bodies and numerous other stakeholders should be differentiated, with specific attention for the threat of regulatory capture by incumbents and capacities of regulatory agencies to facilitate desired innovation. This makes studies on the interplay between regulation and standards and their various impacts a highly relevant topic in the national innovation systems and innovation policy context. In this track, we invite studies addressing this, for example by considering the following topics:
• How to use standards and regulation to balance their various impact dimensions?
• Which different roles do standards and regulation play along technology and market cycles?
• How to foster involvement of all relevant stakeholders without risking biased solutions by regulatory capture and/or significant delay where timely solutions are urgently needed, e.g., related to climate change?
• How to tailor standardisation and regulation to the needs of specific technologies, particularly general purpose technologies (and should this be done in the first place)?
• Which roles and capacities of regulatory agencies and standardising bodies are needed to facilitate desired innovations and transformative potential?
• Comparisons between different policy approaches to the interplay of standards and regulation also considering the increasing geopolitical tensions.
• Any others which examine the role of standards or regulation to make our world better.
Keywords: standardisation, regulation, innovation, research