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Businesses face regulation, standards, and other external requirements from their operating environments. Taking the example of standards, the chapter reviews findings of these requirements’ substantial impacts on innovation and new product development. Depending on the specific standard, these impacts can be positive (e.g. facilitating market access, defining interfaces to supporting infrastructures) or negative (e.g. causing lock-in). This makes standards a key topic for innovators to address. This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the study by reviewing the limited existing literature on managing standards. Previous company-level studies of standards mostly do not address innovation contexts. Existing industry-level studies on innovation and standards provide few relevant insights for new product development contexts. The chapter concludes by outlining important theoretical gaps that the book addresses.

The development of micro Combined Heat and Power (mCHP), a radical innovation in the European heating industry, occurred in response to demands for increased energy efficiency and CO emission reductions. This chapter introduces the mCHP case, which provides an excellent understanding of how innovators address standards. The chapter provides an overview over the study’s grounded theory approach, which is based on extensive interviews with innovators and other key actors. The chapter also offers important background information about mCHP and the European heating industry. This traditional industry is characterised by its predominantly small- and medium-sized firms and their focus on long-term development.

micro Combined Heat and Power (mCHP) relies on standards in around a dozen technical areas, related to topics like product safety, electricity grid access, and environmental performance. This chapter provides an overview over relevant standards and their effect on mCHP. Under the European ‘New Approach’, many of these standards define ‘essential requirements’ in line with European regulation. This link makes standards important elements for conformity assessment and proving mCHP appliances’ regulatory compliance. Standards are therefore key enablers for mCHP’s developers to place the technology on the European market. The chapter concludes with an overview over the effects of standards and regulation on innovation in the mCHP case.

micro Combined Heat and Power (mCHP) technology was developed by several established companies and start-ups in parallel. This chapter provides detailed insights into the different companies’ innovation management approaches. Based on in-depth interviews, it compares how these firms managed standards and regulation while developing their mCHP products. It shows the types of awareness, expertise, and resources needed to provide a solid foundation for addressing standards and regulation that affect an innovation. Building on this, the chapter shows how these factors enable managers to introduce their innovations into highly regulated markets.

This chapter provides in-depth insights into the extensive collaboration across multiple actors in the European heating industry during micro Combined Heat and Power’s (mCHP) development. Actors in the industry cooperated both in developing mCHP technology and related standardisation/regulation processes. The chapter outlines the role of non-company actors (e.g. industry associations) and the industry’s intellectual property rights approach (IPRs) in facilitating this cooperation. This chapter gives a detailed account of the particularly dynamic and contentious processes of standardising and regulating access to the electricity grid and requirements for energy efficiency labels. These examples show how innovators can jointly create conditions that support their innovation, even if major stakeholders (including government) oppose the technology. The examples also show how innovators can handle important policy and societal issues.

This chapter combines the patterns identified in the earlier chapters into a generalisable grounded theory and identifies the relationships between them. This grounded theory is based on a framework of three nested levels: (1) the company, which is part of (2) an industry, which is in turn part of (3) its wider context. The theory focuses on supporting factors and activities needed on the company- and industry levels to facilitate effective management of standards and regulation in innovation contexts. This chapter also shows how the three levels are linked together. The grounded theory explains how innovators can deal with demands and influences from the wider context by engaging in industry-level collaboration.

This chapter concludes the book by discussing the findings in light of literature and giving clear managerial advice. The study extends the literature on effects of standards and regulation on innovation, integrating them into new product development, and associated dynamics on the industry level. In addition, the results link to other streams of literature, such as theories about sociotechnical systems, regulatory uncertainty, co-opetition, and the need for rules in the functioning of markets. This chapter shows these links and outlines trajectories for future research to explore them further. It also highlights the study’s managerial implications and translates them into clear advice for innovators and other actors, such as industry associations.