Standards Are a Meaningful Driver of Innovation, New Research Finds

A new study offers fresh evidence that standards meaningfully contribute to innovation — not merely compliance — in sectors central to U.S. competitiveness.

Commissioned by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and conducted by researchers Filippo Grillo and Justus Baron of BRELA Research in Economics and Legal Analytics and Northwestern University’s Center on Law, Business, and Economics, the study examines standardization and innovation in two critical and emerging technology sectors: autonomous driving and advanced manufacturing. The researchers linked academic publications, more than 9,800 standards documents, and patent citations from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty to trace how standards connect to new inventions.

Among the findings:

• Patents frequently cite standards as foundational knowledge. Roughly 6.5 percent of autonomous driving standards and 5.5 percent of advanced manufacturing standards are cited in patent applications, with activity concentrated in specific high-impact areas.
• The standards most associated with innovation are developed by international, non-profit, consensus-based bodies. Standards from governments and individual companies appear far less often in patent citations.
• Document type matters. Standards addressing test methods, performance measurement, interoperability, cybersecurity, and data management are far more likely to be cited by inventors than terminology or draft documents.
• Timing matters, too. Technology areas with shorter, more concentrated standardization cycles receive substantially more patent citations per standard than those with longer, more diffuse cycles — suggesting that moving with appropriate speed supports innovation outcomes.

The study concludes that standards, when developed by effective institutions and introduced at the right moment in a technology’s evolution, can play a meaningful role in spreading knowledge, coordinating industries, and enabling new inventions. The findings reinforce the case for treating standardization as a core part of innovation policy, and they affirm the strength of the U.S. approach to standardization, which is led by the private sector and built on consensus.

The full study is available here.