C3.4.5 Benefits of Standards
How do Standards help industry?
Standards support innovation by:
- sharing best practice, so designers can focus on developing better products
- setting benchmarks for performance, quality and safety
- ensuring similar products work together (e.g. making sure all CDs are the same dimensions)
- making technical requirements
- reducing risks
- reducing costs
Example: DIY retailer selling timber
- Standards ensure the timber is of suitable quality, e.g. not rotten
- Standards enable the retailer to innovate by getting hold of environmentally friendly timber
- Standards enable the company to strengthen market reputation for responsibility and innovation
Standards enable ideas from one country to become accepted internationally by:
- exporting ideas that open up overseas markets and raise the profile of national industries and commerce
- competitive advantage from being world leaders
- international meetings lead to exchange of ideas
Example: nanotechnology
- from self-cleaning windows to silicon structures that can take drugs to the exact location of the tumour, nanotechnology is predicted to create a market worth over $1trillion within the next 10 years
- Standards are being developed to assist in the safe development of the technology and to deliver it to the marketplace.
Standards balance the needs of the producer and user by:
- creating market-led solutions (i.e. what do people want to buy?)
- reflecting all interests, including small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), consumers, regulators, industry and the environment
- promoting fair competition and avoiding unhealthy concentrations of economic power
- reducing costs for development and production
- increasing the diversity and quality of suppliers for producers and consumers
Example: Millennium Bridge, London
- almost 100,000 people walked across the Millennium Bridge in London when it opened, yet two days later it was closed because it wobbled due to Synchronous Lateral Excitation
- engineers immediately began working on a solution and, together with BSI, produced a modified British Standards Code of Bridge Loading
- future bridge builders will now be able to carry our stringent tests to make sure their bridge and its users won’t experience the same problem