Complex standards and innovation in the digital economy: The Internet Protocol

Abstract

As Web-based services evolve from a medium for data exchange to a system for managing geographically-dispersed work flows, the complexity of the supporting infrastructure is increasing along with the sophistication of the actual services. This paper presents a case study of the global transition to IPv6 to illustrate the importance of a standards infrastructure in the evolution of internet-based services across the global economy and the consequent strategic and policy issues facing industry and government. Industry cost data ore presented and a model is proposed to explicitly represent the role of standards in the innovation process and illuminate private sector investment risks