Strategies for Influencing the Standardization Process: Examples from Within

This paper presents some factors and explores the strategies utilized by companies for influencing the standardization process in mobile telecommunication. The paper is based on an indepth case-study of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). In the paper I divide the companies into different types; Operators, Manufactures and application vendors and establish some common strategies used by the different type of actors. I find that the operators and the large manufacturers have a vertical approach where they try to influence every part of the value chain/domain they are part of. They would like to control everything from the core infrastructure to the services running on top of it and work together in many standardization organizations to uphold this control. The application vendors have a horizontal approach. The majority of application vendors have no hope of dominating the whole value chain they are a part of and rather opt for a part in many different value chains. Since their products are more adoptable they tend to be present in standardization within more domains/value chains. The operators are most influenced by time-to-market, the manufacturers by IPR and the application vendors by customer relationship. They are all concerned with alliance building