Windows of Opportunity in Standardization? How Latecomers Catch up via Technological Shifts and Inter-organizational Collaboration

Technological discontinuities are recognized as key drivers of economic change and have the potential to profoundly alter existing structures and drive the spatial shift of technology leadership (TUSHMAN &amp; ANDERSON, 1986). The upheaval in an existing technological system necessitates new forms of knowledge, experience, and skills and incumbents may face challenges in adapting to these changes (e.g. CHANDY &amp; TELLIS, 2000; NELSON &amp; WINTER, 1982). Times of technological change, therefore, offer a “window of opportunity” to previously non-established or lagging players (PEREZ &amp; SOETE, 1988), enabling them to gain a foothold in an industry, and to attain greater collaboration embeddedness and influence, both of which are crucial components in their catch-up process.<br/>The technological change does not necessarily have to be a disruptive upheaval of the entire techno-economic paradigm to open such a window of opportunity. Generational technological changes with some relationship between an old and a new generation of a technology also have this potential and open up a window of opportunity for latecomers to catch-up (LAWLESS &amp; ANDERSON, 1996; PEREZ &amp; SOETE, 1988). The process of technological change across generations is not highly disruptive, allowing for knowledge obtained by latecomers in a previous generation to serve as a fundamental basis for building capabilities in a subsequent technology generation (LI et al., 2019).<br/>Technical standards are considered to be one of the main drivers of technical generational change and are therefore of particular importance in this context (LI et al., 2019). They stabilize the variations of technological change, steer them in a certain direction and thus significantly shape technological trajectories (KIM et al., 2017; BEKKERS &amp; MARTINELLI, 2012). They serve as a medium of coordination and the process of standards-development is characterized by the interactive discourse of a wide variety of industry and policy stakeholders. Standardization participants come together in committees, develop technical specifications based on consensus, and often form smaller inter-organizational alliances within the working groups in order to promote and implement specific technical solutions (TUEBNER et al., 2021). These forms of collaboration offer further advantages to the actors involved, such as the access to complementary R&amp;D assets, knowledge about new technologies, or learning about the strategies of peers or the potential evolution of markets (e.g. BAR &amp; LEIPONEN, 2014). Actors who play a central role in the standardization alliances are able to significantly influence standard setting in their industry, accelerate the market introduction of new products, and shape technological trajectories (WEN et al., 2020). The catching-up of latecomers to the technological frontier is closely linked to the way in which formal standardization is pursued and implemented by them (CHOUNG et al., 2011).<br/>By providing novel insights and network-based perspectives from international standardization in the telecommunications industry, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the discourse on the nexus of technological change, windows of opportunity and the catching-up of latecomers. Within the context of the standards development organization 3GPP, we explore the transformative impact of the shift from the third to the fourth generation of mobile telecommunications standards. Our central questions are:<br/>• To what extent do generational shifts in technology offer latecomers from emerging countries an opportunity to strengthen their position and to catch-up with actors from more established regions?<br/>• What role do (non-)domestic collaborations play for actors from these latecomer economies?<br/>• To what extent is this role and the underlying geographical pattern changing in the wake of the new standard generation?<br/>In our empirical data, we specifically focus on the embeddedness and collaboration patterns of emerging market actors hailing from China and South Korea. In order to approach these research questions, we built a dataset of more than 80,000 Change Requests (CRs), which are key contributions, submitted by 3GPP standardization participants to introduce functional changes for technical specifications during the standards development. CRs are developed either independently or jointly with other companies. These final technical specifications are compiled and published in consecutive bundles, referred to as Releases. In Release 4, the initial technical specifications for the third generation of mobile telecommunications standards were published (here called ‘3G W-CDMA’). Subsequently, in Release 8, the first technical documents of the fourth generation were published (here called ‘4G LTE’), followed later on by Release 15, which marked the beginning of the 5G era (simply called ‘5G’). For each release phase, we were able to perform a network projection based on the CRs associated with it, calculate firm-level network characteristics, and distinctively assign them to a standard generation (Release 4 to 7: 3G W-CDMA; Release 8 to 14: 4G LTE).<br/>Based on this comprehensive dataset of inter-organizational collaboration across both the 3G W-CDMA and 4G LTE standard generations, we estimated a fixed effects panel regression model in order to examine the effects of the generational shift on the relative embeddedness of actors from different countries. The model features a normalized firm degree centrality measure as the dependent variable, reflecting the centrality of each firm relative to other companies at each point in time, and further incorporates an interaction between the time dummy representing the standard era (1 = LTE) and the firms' origin.<br/>Our findings suggest that the generational shift is associated with a significantly stronger embeddedness of Chinese and South Korean firms – especially with respect to actors from Europe, Japan and the US. While companies from the latter regions have also experienced an uplift in their embeddedness and collaborative networks, our findings reveal that this increase has been significantly less pronounced than that observed for firms from South Korea and China, implying a relative loss of leverage and importance for the incumbent regions.<br/>In our further analysis, we also observed that Chinese firms show a particular emphasis on domestic collaborations. In the wake of the generational shift, however, this reliance has significantly decreased, though it remains more pronounced than that of players from other regions. This novel finding indicates that China's approach to international standardization shifted markedly between the development of the 3G W-CDMA to 4G LTE mobile standards, moving away from its initial techno-nationalistic stance. Subsequently, greater emphasis was placed on partnerships with foreign companies, reflecting China's aspirations to become a global leader in the forthcoming wireless standards (KWAK et al., 2012).<br/>The results further give an indication of how the broader spatial collaboration patterns have shifted in the course of the generational change. Canadian, German and Finnish companies (and European players in general) have relatively lost importance as cooperation partners in favor of East Asian and US actors. Not only therefore, our paper concludes that the generational technology shift has led to multi-layered transformations in the telecommunications industry, leading to the disruption and alteration of established structures and geographic patterns.<br/>These results thus provide a valuable contribution to the discussion surrounding the catching-up process of latecomers at times of a technology-induced window of opportunity. The push towards greater embeddedness in standards development could be a competitive measure that allows latecomers to be first to meet new challenges sparked by changes in the broader economic environment and to shape major technological trajectories.<br/>The development of the sixth-generation mobile communications standard is already underway. By effectively exploiting the opportunities arising from the rapidly changing environment, latecomers have the opportunity to consolidate or further strengthen their position relative to incumbent actors.

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