Research On Technology Standardization Process For The Development Of Emerging Industry In China

In China, issuing technology standardization is one kind of important ways to stimulate the development of emerging industries.During the process of technology standardization, the government not only needs to take the lead to participate, but also should encourage industry actors to start technology research and join in the standardization process. However, emerging industry can not learn much from the history, compare to traditional industry which have much more mature technology trend, industry and market because emerging technology is pioneering, complicated and highly uncertain and Chinese emerging industry basically keeps same pace with international world regarding technology standard development, which leads to the fact that technology standardization for emerging industry is quite difficult and challenging, to be specific, higher demands are requested to the innovation&research abilities for participating actors as well as the organization abilities of technology standardization work.In one way, the innovation abilities of Chinese enterprises are not enough to develop technology standards for emerging industry; therefore the innovation performances by other non-market actors (like the government, colleges and universities, scientific research institutions, standardization organizations etc.) can’t be ignored. So technology standardization for emerging industry is only purely the innovation by enterprises, it involves cooperative innovation by lots of kinds of actors (referred as multiple actors in this paper) to meet the extraordinary request that strategic emerging industry must make innovations in core technology areas relating national interests and people’s livelihood. In the other way,"the participation of multiple actors" for standardization of emerging industry, offers relevant request to organization modes of technology standardization for emerging industry. During the process of technology standardization for emerging industry, how to get effective organization to make and develop technology standards can greatly influence the introduction of technology standards. However, interest groups of all kinds own important resources, which can affect the outputs of other actors during the development of emerging industry. Of course nobody can have all the resources during the process. Therefore, technology standardization for emerging industry needs the organization mode where multiple actors work together for innovation and lots of heterogeneous sources are gathers to boost the development of technology standardization.The topics of this paper comes after further refinement to standardization characteristics of emerging industries in China, which is, it is quite important and necessary to study technological standardization of emerging industries regarding process and canonization mode. Usually, Chinese government tends to lead or participate the interaction between multiple subjects during technology standardization and promotes its development with market actors, non-market actors. Although existing studies notes that technological standardization of emerging industries is a collective activity where lots of actors are interactive, stresses the importance of collaborative innovation organization pattern, they do not combine them together and give in-depth discussion; they mainly, in the perspectives of enterprise, discuss how to reduce the management risk of marketing behaviors of enterprises and seek more competitive advantage through standard competition, but ignore the features of multiple actors during the process, the way the management and organization is carried out as well as the way the interaction and cooperation is done under the organization pattern.First, emerging industry technology standardization process can be divided into technology research and development, standards-setting organization construction and standard formation and promotion stage based on technology maturity, market maturity and the industry maturity from low to high. Regarding organizational behaviors, the essence of technology standardization process of emerging industries is that the core actor of industrial technology standardization successfully translates the problems of various heterogeneous actors, and then they jointly promote the industrial technological standardization. The actors to participate in the emerging industrial technology standardization process presents the features like "more types, large quantity and wide coverage of industrial chain", and formed new situation where the government supervision department as the core actor, enterprises and research institutesas the main body in the advantages of innovation, together with professional standardization institutes, support the pattern of diversity in the main body of collaborative innovation. Standards-setting organization is main organization pattern to realize collaborative innovation of multiple actors during technology standardization of emerging industries. Continuous policy and its support are needed for technology standardization process.Second, the standards-setting organizations during technological standardization process mainly include technology committees, standards working groups, associations, industrial (technology) alliances and enterprise alliances. The above organizations can be divided into two groups, one is task-oriented under which the government is highly involved and presents the characteristics of formal standardization organizations, the other is market-oriented under which the government is less involved and displays the features of informal standardization organizations, which together reflects the trend of technological standardization of Chinese industries from task orientation towards market orientation step by step.Third, the network features of multiple actors during technological standardization are as follows:(1) the multiple-actor cooperation networks mainly include the secretariat, research institutes and enterprise. For Standards-setting organization of different orientation, their development goals and resources quantity demand also varies, affecting the features of multiple actors.It is found that the task-oriented standards-setting organization aims to promote the development of the national key technology whereresearch institutesbecome more likely the initiator of technology standard cooperation network, and the secretariat on behalf of the government intervenes the technological standardization network and supplies critical support and plays the roles as a supervisor and manager, lots of enterprise who participate and drive the development and maturity of technological standardization cooperation network. Market-oriented standards-setting organizations make the industrial development as the goal, among which the initial initiator of technology standard cooperation network is some core enterprises and the secretariat provides important support and services to build technology standard cooperation network, and a large number of industrial enterprises participate and drives technology standard cooperation network towards maturity.(2) Regarding the rational embeddedness, the multiple-actor cooperation network forms five cooperation modes, which are:leading to build the project, drafting, jointly proposing, seeking the opinions and tracking and learning. Based on different cooperation modes, the cooperation network can be grouped into inter-depending cooperation and participating cooperation regarding the embedding degree of multiple actors. Regarding different orientation, major partners and partnership differ among cooperation network for multiple actors. In task-oriented standards-setting organizations, the secretariat and core research institutes more likely establish mutual cooperation relationship because they jointly lead to launch the project, prepare the draft and propose which are done by secretariat and enterprises under market-oriented standards-setting organizations and they have more possibilities to establish interdependent relations of cooperation.(3) Regarding the structural embeddedness, the multiple-actor cooperation networks in standards-setting organizations have a variety of network structure, which play different effects.The secretariat owns the high position in the multiple-actor cooperation network. However, because of different orientation, secretariat affects the choices of major partners, and then affects the position of actors in multiple-actor cooperation networks. In the task-oriented standards-setting organization, secretariat tends to choose research institutes as major partners which makes them at higher position and becomes core players, while in the market-oriented standards-setting organization, secretariat tends to choose enterprises as partners which gets them higher rank in the network and plays core roles. In the multiple-actor cooperation network, the actors with higher structure holes index are superior and mainly they own basic or core patent for the patents, while actors at inferior position possibly participate standardization activity driven by tracking technology and they have lower structure hole index.Theoretically, as a start, this paper analyzes the technology standardization of emerging industries from the perspective of organization and organization behavior studies, explicitly describes the progressive stages of technological standardization of emerging industries under highly uncertain circumstances, recognizes the major organization mode for multiple actorsas well as the types of major multiple actors who participate the standardization process and play important roles. Second, this paper studies lots of different standardization organizations in China by ways of second-handed information gathering, focus group and in-depth interviews, with the help of literature on foreign standardization organization and consideration of Chinese context divide standardization organizations into five patterns and two orientations. Finally, this paper extends the researches for existing standardization organization of emerging industries because of the multiple-actor cooperation network, and the findings like relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness enriches technology standardization theories and social network theories.In practice, this paper provides advice for technology standardization of emerging industries regarding organization management and the participation of multiple actors as well as basis and enlightenment which can further boost the development of our strategic emerging industries.