INTEREST Integrating Research and Standardisation
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Contract No: 503 594 INTEREST Integrating Research and Standardisation STREP Priority 8 D04 - Report on Case Studies Due Date: 31st of January 2006 Delivery Date: 16th of March, 2006 Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (2002-2006) Dissemination Level PU Public PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the XXXXXXXX Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission) 1 Content 1 Introduction.............................................................................................................5 1.1 The relationship between research and standardization.................................5 1.2 Organization of the report................................................................................7 Part one: case studies on the interface between research and standardisation....9 2 Introducing the ten organizational case studies ...............................................11 2.1 Structure of Part one .....................................................................................12 3 Research and Technology Organisations: five cases ......................................13 3.1 Introduction....................................................................................................13 3.2 SINTEF: The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Norwegian Institute of Technology................................................................14 3.3 TNO: Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research ..................27 3.4 Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing.............................34 3.5 Munich FIW (Forschungsinstitut für Wärmeschutz) ......................................37 3.6 NMi: Dutch Metrology Institut ........................................................................41 4 Commercial Enterprises: Five Cases .................................................................45 4.1 Introduction....................................................................................................45 4.2 Sun Microsystems (network computer products and services) .....................45 4.3 Telecoms company .......................................................................................53 4.4 Blohm und Voss ............................................................................................57 4.5 Teer Coatings (and SME in coating technologies) ........................................63 4.6 SMITH and NEPHEW (medical devices) ......................................................66 5 Organizational cases: Synthesis and conclusions ...........................................71 5.1 Organizational level.......................................................................................71 5.2 Synthesizing observations from the various cases .......................................72 Part two: case studies on patent pools as a coordination mechanism.................78 6 Introduction...........................................................................................................79 6.1 Research design ...........................................................................................80 6.2 Structure of part two ......................................................................................81 7 Standards, patenting and patent pools ..............................................................83 7.1 Patents in standards: essential and non-essential patents ...........................83 7.2 A tragedy of the anticommons.......................................................................84 7.3 Coordination mechanisms to deal with patent access problems in standardisation .............................................................................................85 7.4 Patent pools essentials .................................................................................88 3 7.5 Examples of past and recent patent pools ....................................................89 8 Regulatory approaches towards patent pools ..................................................97 8.1 Pro- and anticompetitive aspects of patent pools..........................................97 8.2 Antitrust regulation in the US.........................................................................99 8.3 Competition policy in the EU .......................................................................101 9 The three case studies on patent pools and associated coordination mechanisms ..............................................................................................................105 9.2 Case DVD/MPEG technology .....................................................................105 9.3 Case Second- and third generation mobile telecommunications (2G/3G) ..116 9.4 Case OpenDocument and XML Reference Schemas.................................135 9.5 Issues and observations..............................................................................138 9.6 Analysis and discussion of the patent pool and other coordination cases ..141 9.7 Preliminary conclusions and policy implications..........................................145 Appendix 1: A bit of history – patents in telecommunications up to the mid- 1980s ..........................................................................................................................149 Appendix 2: UMTS history overview.......................................................................153 Appendix 3: Patent pools overview.........................................................................161 Literature....................................................................................................................163 4 1 Introduction Standards play a vital but varied role in the European market and in society more generally. Standards have wide implications and they can significantly influence the conditions for technology transfer, for competition, as well as those for public policy concerns. Given their significance, it is important that emerging standards are relevant to—and that they reflect current research. This report starts from the observation that the standards setting process relies to an increasing degree on successfully integrating— or otherwise taking into consideration— up-to-date research and development results (R&D). The successful interaction between research and standards can provide important benefits to society. There is however a number of challenges that the INTEREST project posit are currently impeding the successful interaction at the interface between research and standardization. One is undoutably the question of awareness about the standardization process both at the level of the individual researchers as well as the organizational level. Where there is awareness, the next concern is likely to involve the dedication of sufficient resources to build up the expertise at each levels. A first challenge is the basic need to better understand the interface between research activities and technical standardisation. An improved empirically based understanding is integral to finding ways to improve how this interface works. This report provides two main sets of case studies designed to study the relationship between what will be refered to as the Research or R-Frame and the Standardization or S-Frame. This report thus links in with Deliverable D02 by providing indepth empirical information of the interface of the R- and S-frames in given contexts. The nature and objective of the cases are presented below. First, some preliminary observations about the relationship between research and standardization activities, and how it tends to be perceived, are made. 1.1 The relationship between research and standardization Innovation and standardization are often seen as competing rather than as complementary activities. Since a technical standard effectively constrains choice, it is often associated with a potential block for research and one which may close off certain technical avenues of inquiry. This general perception tends to build on a picture of standards as involving races or indeed wars which pit rival technologies against one another; this casual perception seems particularly prevalent among researchers who fear that their degrees of freedom will be reduced. This casual perception tends to undermine the fact that standards and research can rather involve a complementary relationship. The general characterization that research activities introduce a diversification of technological possibilities (with their own trajectories) therefore tends to clash with the characterization that standards are variety-reducing and that they serve to select 5 out technologies. This trade-off between variety-creation and diversity-reduction can indeed be seen as a fundamental feature in the evolution of technology. Too much diversity can stifle technological progress if good ideas are crowded out. Over time, therefore, some selection is generally called for, in order for technological products to really take hold and for a technology trajectory to be established. On the other hand, the reduction of variety before the technology has sufficiently matured can negatively affect future developments. Thus, as with any trade-off, there is a balance at work, and timing can be critical. But this perception tends to overstate the role of standards in constraining functional choices and it overlooks the contribution