Obstacles

Standards help to bridge the gap between research and market.

STAND4EU Obstacles

During the first phase of the project, STAND4EU focused on having a good understanding about the current bottlenecks, barriers and obstacles that hamper or prevent the development and uptake of standardisation efforts.

The main bottlenecks identified were:

  • Lack of resources and funding
  • Lack of time
  • Poor quality of a standard
  • Lack of expertise
  • Low coordination and lack of processes
  • Complexity of a process and bureaucracy
  • Complexity of scope and landscape
  • Poor involvement of experts
  • Low motivation and interest
  • Poor transferability, low support and missing education propositions
  • Low development speed
  • Lack of consensus and conflict of interests

Bottlenecks and Key Recommendations:

Comprehensive online surveys were conducted across national, European and international levels across four technological domains: Additive Manufacturing, Welding, Smart Manufacturing & AI, Circular Economy.

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Below are presented some information and graphics extracted from the conducted survey, interviews and trend analysis workshops:

Our results show that the major obstacles identified are a lack of awareness about the right standard(s) to be used, apart from financial costs, non-financial costs like time, labour and capacity required to implement standards, and the complexity of standards.



Our interview results also show that beyond financial and non-financial costs (time/manpower/capacity), there are multiple other obstacles identified by respondents.

Some of these concern the amount of comments in standardisation reports, keeping track of what is published, a lack of access to all standards, making dialogue with other companies, gaining support from the community, getting a consensus during the voting process, the difficulty of developing a standard in a language they are not native in, finding the correct project leader, and the lack of marketing.



Our top suggestions to improve standardisation from our interviews include funding increases, time reductions, and other, more specific recommendation.

Some of these are developing standards to motivate consumers to use a product, publishing standards in a minimum viable form and updating them later, making a platform to find standards easier, avoiding duplication of work through information-sharing across projects, aligning standards with values of the civil society, creating a body to write routine reports on standardisation, and creating machine-readable systemic standards.