Explorer China and Global ICT standardisation and innovation

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. The People's Republic of China has recently become remarkably active in the development of interoperability standards across many areas of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Such standards are crucial for the creation of new industries and markets for novel ICT products and services. This engagement in standardisation is linked to the Chinese government's strategy to develop indigenous technologies and, in some cases through involvement in international standardization bodies, to put China at the heart of the next generation of global technological infrastructures. In this way China seeks to go beyond its globally competitive productive capabilities to acquire technology innovation capabilities. This strategy throws up important issues for China's technology promotion policy in terms of how to contribute to standardisation processes and of how to exploit public sector research and development. China's involvement in the shaping of these globally significant technologies will have far reaching consequences for developed economies and global ICT markets, posing challenges for industrial strategy and innovation policies across the developed and developing world. The USA has tended to see China's search for indigenous technologies as potentially damaging to free trade and competition. In contrast the European Union has responded by seeking to align China's indigenous ICT innovation policies with the European Research Area. However the globalisation of innovation signalled by these developments, based upon complex matrices of Intellectual Property, innovative capability and market knowledge from a wide array of industrial and research players across the world, calls into question simplistic established conceptions of 'indigenous' technologies. These developments thus raise a number of issues – which are explored in relation to various examples of ICT standardisation and innovation.