An InterActive Forum

While most conferences simply dump data on participants, perhaps generating a few ideas that quickly fade once they return to their daily lives, this conference is designed to stimulate action. It brings diverse experts in policy, information and communications technology (ICT), standardization, trade, and law to the discussion table in an environment that encourages frank interaction and cooperation. By doing this, it is intended to expand decision makers’ thinking processes about standardization issues and to present viable, practical solutions for stimulating and capitalizing on innovation. Attendance is limited to provide participants ample opportunities to exchange ideas with each other and conference speakers.

Conference Topics

There will be four conference sessions. These sessions will feature short presentations by each panelist followed by an interactive discussion. Audience participation in these discussions is strongly encouraged.

• Standardization: A Shifting Foundation
• Governments in Action: Standardization for National Advantage
• Leveraging Innovation through Standardization
• Policies for National Prosperity

Conference Schedule

Panel 1: Standardization: A Shifting Foundation
The new nature of innovation demands a dynamic balance between collaboration and competition. People and ideas must be brought together in a way that allows them to collaborate on one level and compete on a higher level to advance innovation. Standardization has traditionally served as the foundation to achieve that balance.

Today, however, it is tilting drastically towards competition. As a result, countries are threatening to start their own standardization systems which favor their own domestic products. Corporations must invest in competing standardization efforts to ensure they back the winner. And small business cannot afford the cadre of lawyers nor extensive time needed to strategically participate in standardization. In short, this shifting foundation is undermining interoperability and ultimately innovation. The panel will examine how standardization can be revised to serve as a stable foundation for collaboration and competition so that innovation can be maximized and leveraged. Topics may include:

• Innovation’s new nature
• Product vs. process? The critical focus
• Impact of different standardization approaches
• Market leaders: innovation stiflers or stimulators?
• The ultimate paradox: Competition among standards setting organizations

Panel 2:  Governments in Action: Standardization for National Advantage
Governments in China, Brazil, India, and Europe, among others, consider standardization to be critical to their nation’s competitiveness and long-term financial prosperity. Many have cohesive national or regional standardization strategies that help to nurture and capture innovation. Some use standardization to promote their industries’ strengths, while others employ it to encourage compliance with government requirements. Other governments, however, are content to leave this powerful mechanism at the mercy of private industries. They do little to take advantage of standardization, other than to condone the activity. This panel looks at the role that government should play in standardization to reap maximum benefits from innovation. Topics may include:

• Standardization—Public or private leadership?
• Policies that stimulate—and stifle—innovation
• Government as IPR manager?
• Policies for creating a favorable standards IPR environment: a story from the trenches
• Keeper of the Gate: Government as standards organization legitimizer
• Standardization complexity: the need for government intervention

Panel 3: Leveraging Innovation through Standardization
Innovation can yield long-term economic growth and prosperity for nations. But achieving these results requires more than just increasing R&D investments or education initiatives. Innovation must be nurtured within a system that enables it to produce implementations that can be productized—that is, implementations that will provide a total package or whole product that includes all the pieces necessary to give full value. And that productization should deliver direct economic, as well as social benefits, back to the innovating nation. Standardization can provide a system for this kind of innovative growth and output. But the system must be revised to support national goals. This panel will discuss the potential of standardization to help nations capitalize on innovation. Topics may include:

• Capturing industry and academic knowledge
• Driving economic growth through standardization
• Increasing international competitive advantage for national industries
• Standardization as a job growth mechanism

Panel 4: Policies for National Prosperity
Innovators may create new solutions or they may develop unique combinations of existing solutions. Most of the time, innovations that appear dramatic are actually built upon previous ideas. Oftentimes they are not revolutionary; they simply solve a problem more effectively than a previous solution. Occasionally, they identify a problem we didn’t know existed until a solution was presented. Policy makers play a unique role. They have the power to stimulate—or stifle—innovation, depending on how they address the challenges their nation faces. Standardization can serve as a government tool for stimulating innovation within a system that allows maximum benefits to be reaped. This panel will build upon the all of the conference discussions. The panel and participants will make specific policy recommendations for strengthening a nation’s standardization system so that it yields economic and social benefits.