Openness for Innovation and Involvement in Standardization: Evidence from the Community Innovation Survey

This paper develops cross-sectoral hypotheses about driving factors of service companies to participate in formal standardization at national standards bodies and tests them based on a sample of Dutch service companies. Our results of the multivariate Probit regression models reveal that company size, export activities, internal R&D and successful market innovation activities have a positive and statistically significant impact on a firms’ likelihood to participate in formal standardization. Additionally, the likelihood heavily depends on the service industry and to a considerable extent also on the service type. Hence, the heterogeneity of the service industries can also be found within standardization. The results indicate that alongside the cross-sectoral and firm-specific factors, certain sector-specific factors influence formal service standardization activities. Based on the empirical results we derive implications both for managers of ser-vice companies and policy makers.