Innovation-Centric Perspective

The standardization process and the success and failure of standards takes place in complex socio-technical settings that are shaped by a variety of factors and a multitude of actors (Gerst et al., 2005). The research reported in this book seeks to establish these factors in relation to the adoption and diffusion of data-exchange standards. Chapter 2 identified that there was a need to investigate the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards to fill gaps within both the ISO/TC184/SC4 community and the research community for IT-standards adoption. Chapter 3 then introduced the novel approach of taking both an innovation-centric and adopter-centric view to address the research question, and chronicled the development of two conceptual models that capture the key factors to be researched. Following on from that, Chapter 4 went on to discuss the justifications for the interpretivist philosophy, qualitative approach and case study research strategy subscribed to for this phase of the research. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to verify and examine the validity of the factors identified in the original innovation-centric model. The remainder of this introduction section gives an overview of the data collection and analysis processes that has been used in this chapter, and gives a brief overview of the ISO sub-committee responsible for the development of the two case study standards and concludes with a brief introduction to the chosen standards.