The development of short message services: Standard organizations as engines of innovations

The paper investigates the role of standard organizations as engines of innovation examining the emergence and evolution of the short message service (sms). The empirical analysis elaborates the information collected from a series of interviews carried out with members of the standard committees in charge of non-voice services in the global system for mobile communications (gsm) environment, and from the minutes of the meetings where sms development was discussed. The goal is to understand the characteristics of the process of cooperative invention underpinning the development of one of the few commercially successful, nonvoice mobile telecom services, in order to evaluate the importance of standard organizations as engines of innovations