Joining Standards Organizations: the role of R&D expenditures, patents, and the product-market position

This paper studies collaborative innovation in the context of developing open technology standards coordinated by standards organizations. Using longitudinal data from the world's largest R&D investors matched with membership information from 180 standards organizations, we analyze the firm-level determinants of the extent of participation in standards development. We identify a highly robust positive effect of a firm's R&D expenditure on its involvement in standards organizations, and find this impact being further bolstered by the firm's patenting intensity and/or product-market position. Exploiting exogenous variations induced by preferential tax treatment, we find a causal positive effect of patenting intensity on the participation of R&D-intensive firms in standards organizations. This effect is, however, only significant for membership in organizations developing standards potentially subject to Standard-Essential Patents. Our findings also underscore the significant role of the firm's product-market position in incentivizing engagement in standards development, as exemplified by trademarking intensity, brand value or the number of standard-compliant end product models