Motivation for and barriers against the inclusion of standardisation in European academic research and education.

Abstract

The EC has repeatedly been pointing to the need to improve the education regarding standardisation (COM (2011) 311). Recently this need was confirmed by the “Joint Initiative on Standardisation (JIS)” of the public and the private partners in the European Standardisation System (COM (2016) 358). The JIS called for actions “to explore and promote standardisation as an element of formal education and academic … training” (domain 1/action 3). This assessment aims at providing explanations for the paradox that the economic importance of standardisation is meanwhile undisputed both at the macro and the micro level, whereas research and especially education on standardisation is rare or absent. The assessment provides the picture of the present situation regarding the barriers impeding “standardisation” to become an element of teaching and research inEuropean universities and the motivation for those universities which engage in standardisation-related lecturing andresearch. This insight is direct support to the work of the JIS. It also gives orientation to the ECfor proposing appropriate policy measures within its limits of competence and respecting theprinciple of subsidiarity.

This content is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

External Links