This is Michail Tsatsanis signing in to continue talking about my Technology Marketing Center case study on How to Balance Standards and Innovation.
Last week we discussed the need to focus the company's standardization objectives, to minimize the areas of confrontation and prioritize the battles. As many of you know however, even the most carefully developed strategy cannot eliminate some key battles with competitors in the standards process. Given the natural divergence of interests of various companies, some key elements of confrontation will have to be fought head on.
This is the place where a startup dreads finding itself; where a key architectural element, like a transmission line code, or a certain functionality of an interface is sternly opposed by bigger incumbent players. The situation seems at first glance hopeless. A small company may not have the people resources to successfully argue the technical merits of its solution to the experts, and to counter the technical objections raised by the adversaries. Even if technically convincing, the solution may not gather the support needed to be accepted for various business and non-technical reasons. Some of the standardization committees (like the IEEE) operate with strong majority rules (up to 75% majority needed to pass a proposal). Worse, some others like ATIS and ITU require consensus. This means that even a few holdouts can stall the process and diminish any prospects for success.
Although some causes may indeed be hopeless, one should not despair. A lot of standards battles have been won successfully by small companies through diligence, hard work and a carefully executed offensive.
The issue of "superiority in numbers", i.e., manpower and technical resources of the competition is not insurmountable. One can fight back with narrowing the scope of the confrontation, judiciously using technical resources throughout the organization, attracting external resources (e.g., university research labs) and forming alliances. More importantly, one has to believe in the cause, that is, people have to believe their technical solution is the best and have to be invested in pushing it through. This is crucial because it relates to morale, and battles cannot be won by low morale troops.
Good leadership and sound strategy do not hurt either...
The most important aspect of clearing the logjam of opposition and pushing through a technical solution is to identify the opinion leaders in the standards committee, and be able to make a convincing case to them. It is key to understand the dynamics of each committee. For example, some of the committees that operate on consensus have strong influence by large customers that are represented in the committee. One may wonder how an organization that operates on consensus can even function and produce any standard, given the different interests of different players. The answer is that large customers provide the cohesion and leadership needed to unify the group.
Convincing the opinion leaders on the superiority of a proposal has two aspects to it, one technical
and one business relared.
- The solution has to be thoroughly technically vetted and people have to be confident that all the wrinkles have been ironed out. This speaks to the hard technical work that is needed to address all technical concerns that inevitably will rise from competitors.
- The solution has to have some tangible value to the customer in terms of lower cost, ease of deployment, better fit into his ecosystem, or other advantage that can translate into things that matter like costs, revenues or market share. Further, this advantage has to be articulated to the customer in a convincing way.
Only though winning the opinion leaders can opposition from larger adversaries be overcome. In our startup we were successful in convincing large customers to articulate a vision of the evolution of their systems that required elements of our proposed solutions. After that, remaining opposition was muted and easier to fend off.
Check in next week for more discussions.
Until then, be well and do well.
-Michail.
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