SME's Access to Standards and Standardisation

SME’s Access to Standards and Standardisation Many SMEs could benefit more from standards and standardisation or even face problems related to standards. This situation is related to the inherent weaknesses of many SMEs, in particular the lack of strategic resources. Solutions may focus on these resources, for instance by compensating a lack of time, money or knowledge. They may also focus on making the ‘supply side’ of standards and standardisation better accessible. The third option is to focus on the role of intermediary organisations to bridge the gap between SMEs and the ‘standardisation world.’ In particular trade associations may play this role. In a research project for the European standards bodies CEN and CENELEC, the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University has distinguished a sequence of barriers to benefit from standards, and another sequence of barriers to benefit from involvement in standardisation. We have developed 58 solutions for better benefiting from standards, for better benefiting from involvement in standardisation, and a third category of general solutions to enable this. We related these solutions to the barriers and added examples of such solutions. This set of 58 solutions may be seen as a ‘tool box’ from which standards bodies as well as trade associations can select the appropriate subset to support SMEs in their country. A survey among both standards bodies and trade associations showed support for almost the entire set of solutions.