Dear Readers of The Unstandardized,

Here is a new selection of news, articles, videos or podcasts that came to my attention recently:

About standards referenced in the legislation

Pressure on standards bodies to make their standards freely available when referenced in legislation continues to mount, as I have been explaining here and there. Over the past few weeks, two significant court decisions have addressed public access to and, more critically, the fair use of such standards by third parties in commercial products.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction against UpCodes, a technology company that operates a freemium platform aggregating U.S. building and fire codes for use by construction professionals, finding that its online publication, without obtaining a license, of ASTM standards incorporated by reference into law likely constitutes fair use:

• American Society for Testing & Materials v. UPCODES Inc, No. 24-2965 (3d Cir. 7 April 2026)

In the other case, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that when an EU directive designed to protect human health refers to international standards, individual must have free access to those standards. This means that such access must be general, effective, without charge and non-discriminatory:

• Judgment of the Court in Case C-155/24 | Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit and Others (21 April 2026)

As such, this judgment extends the ECJ decision of 5 March 2024, about European harmonized standards, to international standards published by ISO.

Also on 21 April, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing on the Pro Codes Act which seeks to balance copyright protection for Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) with the public’s right to access the laws that govern them. The bill would affirm copyright protection for standards incorporated by reference while requiring SDOs to make those standards available online at no cost. As you will note watching the video, witnesses represent a wide spectrum of views on this issue:

In a coming article, I will discuss why the push for free access to standards referenced in regulation is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as legislators and courts overlook the public-private partnership that makes high-quality standards possible in the first place. I will also examine why SDOs that fiercely oppose free access may be choosing the wrong tactic, and why those that embrace it may be underestimating what they are giving away.

About digitalization of standards

This DCL article explains that while organizational dependence on PDF is deepening, not diminishing (PDF is very far from being dead), AI systems working directly from PDFs are building on weak structural foundations:

• PDF: Anatomy of a Document Format and the Paradox it Presents for AI (DCL, Data Conversion Laboratory Inc.)

About standards users

IFAN, the International Federation of Standards Users of which I am a Vice-President, has released new episodes of its podcast. I can only, and strongly, invite you to have a listen:

• Sonya Bird, UL Standards and Engagement - Bringing the User Voice to Global Standards

• Muhamad Ali, HP - Connecting Technology and Standards

• Matthew Sexton, Technical and Compliance Director at BMI - Why the User Voice Matters in Construction

• Laurie Locascio, ANSI President - Why Users Matter in a Global System

• Alton Saunders, Boeing - The User Perspective on Safety, Standards, and Digital Transformation in Aerospace

You can also listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts.

About trade, trade governance, trade policies and geopolitics

The future of the World Trade Organization (WTO) remains unclear:

• A framework for WTO reform: Less law and more politics (Hinrich Foundation)

• Why the WTO is struggling to adapt (Hinrich Foundation)

In the absence of reform, multilateralism is not multilateral anymore:

• How 66 (or is it 67?) WTO members are trying to unblock their e-commerce deal (Hinrich Foundation)

The close of the WTO 14th Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon is another warning that the institution’s decision-making machinery no longer meets the demands of modern trade:

• The WTO cannot keep calling delay a result (Hinrich Foundation)

About international organizations’ funding

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee has released its FY2027 national security and State Department spending bill, which sets the terms and the limits of U.S. financial engagement with international organizations for the coming fiscal year:

• Making appropriations for national security, Department of State, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2027, and for other purposes

To make a long story short, the financial pressure on international organizations keeps growing and this is not without consequences:

• US threatens to halt UN funding unless conditions met (Devex)

• ILO considers large-scale layoffs as member states fail to pay dues (Geneva Solutions)

It is in this context of funding and credibility crisis that the United Nations are looking for a successor to Secretary General António Guterres:

• Race to lead the UN: candidates grilled on peace, reform and great-power tensions (Geneva Solutions)

New publications

• Quality Policy Trilogy (Unido, April 2026)

Business model innovation and digital transformation are occupying a large part of the discussions in standards bodies, with various projects around these issues currently being deployed.

At international level, ISO and IEC are pursuing their SMART Standards programme, which aims to deliver machine‑readable, interoperable standards and to explore new business models for their distribution.

In the United States, SAE International has established the Digital Standards Alliance (DSA) under SAE ITC to “accelerate the integration and use of digital standards across the entire product development lifecycle” and to coordinate the standards industry’s digital transformation around common use cases and services.

In Europe, CEN and CENELEC, two of the three European Standards Organizations recognised under Regulation 1025/20121, recently announced a new value proposition to “move away from a traditional, document‑led model and towards a dynamic model centred around added‑value digital standardization services” (see my previous article European standardization and the illusion of invisible power).

Initiatives described as “digital transformation” in standards bodies are not new. In the 1980s, ISO launched a project to publish its standards in SGML, already with machine‑readable ambitions for its standards, before being abandoned a few years later. In the mid‑1990s, most standards bodies successfully converted their standards from print to PDF, mostly through scanning, enabling the sale of standards via online stores. At the same time, offset printing was progressively replaced by digital, print‑on‑demand workflows, resulting in substantial gains in efficiency. Then came the early twenty‑first century and, somewhat paradoxically, almost a full decade of inertia. It took indeed until 2011 for ISO to relaunch an XML project that was dormant, and to reopen the conversation on structured, reusable standards content. Since then, announcements about “digital transformation” have multiplied, especially around SMART Standards, a major initiative launched in 2021 following the recommendations of ISO’s Technical Management Board Strategic Advisory Group on Machine Readable Standards (ISO/TMB SAG MRS).

If the promise of transformation is everywhere in the communications, its effects on how standards bodies create, deliver and capture value are much harder to see. Despite all this activity and projects, no genuinely “disruptive”, high‑value products or services have emerged at scale, and the underlying business models of standards bodies remain variations of the sale and licensing of their documents.

This article explores why, despite multiple waves of digital initiatives and substantial investments, standards bodies are still struggling to achieve genuine business model innovation, seem to go round in circles, and what they can realistically do about it. To summarize, the high‑level view is that the main obstacles are not technical but conceptual, cultural, structural and political. The current fascination with “digital standards” often hides the real questions, particularly on the fundamental dynamics of why standards are developed and bought, and how they are used, two aspects that remain widely misunderstood.

The argument will develop over ten parts:

• Part 1 – The unbearable pressure: The current pressure on standards bodies and their funding, including calls for free access to standards, legal challenges around standards referenced in legislation, reduction in public subsidies, and geopolitical tensions.

• Part 2 – The struggles: How standards bodies have responded so far, mostly through digital publishing projects, and why many initiatives failed to deliver the expected impact or return on investment.

• Part 3 – The business model confusion: How the lack of clarity around the concept of “business model” leads to poor strategic choices.

• Part 4 – History of standards sales: How standards sales emerged and became central to funding of several standards bodies, and why this configuration is path‑dependent rather than the product of deliberate design.

• Part 5 – Market (mis)understanding: The economic nature of standards as products, and how misreading the demand has led to chronic misalignment between standards bodies and their markets.

• Part 6 – The obsession with digital transformation: How the pressure to “digitalize everything” has turned digital transformation into a mantra, often reduced to tooling and formats.

• Part 7 – When inspiration comes from the wrong benchmark: Why analogies with the music industry and autonomous driving are poor templates for standardization and costly strategic diversions.

• Part 8 – Other barriers to business model innovation: Internal blockers that make transformation so difficult.

• Part 9 – Where we are now: A system that is technologically more sophisticated but financially fragile and strategically hesitant.

• Part 10 – Recommendations: Directions for standards bodies that really want to move towards business models and strategies that are both sustainable and compatible with their public‑interest missions.

So, let’s dive in!

Part 1 – The unbearable pressure

The importance of business model innovation and digital transformation for standards bodies did not emerge ex nihilo. It has grown over the past two decades as a series of external pressures have made the traditional funding mechanisms more fragile.

A first source of pressure comes from court decisions2 and government initiatives calling for free access to standards3, particularly those referenced in legislation or regulation. For standards bodies relying heavily on the revenue from the sale of standards, these moves are a direct challenge to their capacity to finance the work that produces those documents in the first place.

At the same time, many governments face high levels of public debt and budgetary constraints. This translates into reductions in public funding for standards bodies4, particularly for those bodies considered as semi‑public institutions or as key mechanisms of industrial policy.

Geopolitical fragmentation adds another layer of uncertainty. As economic blocs harden and industrial policies are increasingly defined in terms of national‑security, the mission of producing globally relevant standards becomes harder to fulfil in practice. The potential market for a standard tends to narrow to the area of influence of the organization that produced it. In such a context, it is not only the technical legitimacy of standards that is questioned, but also the size of the market they can realistically address, with obvious consequences for any business model that assumes worldwide adoption and revenue (see Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization).

On top of that, standards bodies are increasingly affected by broader debates about overregulation and bureaucratic “red tape”. Policy initiatives that once promoted voluntary standards as a flexible alternative to regulation are now perceived as part of the same problem. This erodes trust in standards bodies and feeds a growing reluctance from stakeholders to invest time and resources in the standards development work. When both regulators and industry start questioning whether standards bodies are part of the solution or part of the problem, the legitimacy that supports their value proposition is put at risk.

Finally, the speed of technological development keeps reshaping how technical knowledge can be created, shared and embedded into products, software or machines, or even large language models. New technologies have the potential to disrupt not only how standards bodies produce and distribute content, but also who is best positioned to do so. Sector‑specific consortia, technology companies and other private Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) already use digital tools to deliver standard‑like content directly into the tools and workflows of their users. For incumbents, the fear is not only to miss out on efficiencies, but to lose their role in the standardization ecosystem altogether.

Taken together, these forces create a problematic equation for standards bodies. Traditional revenue streams are under pressure, political support is more conditional, expectations are rising, and technological change is lowering barriers to entry for potential competitors. Under these circumstances, it is understandable why “business model innovation” and “digital transformation” have become mantras within many organizations. What is more surprising is why, despite years of invoking them, actual changes to business models have, so far, remained very marginal.

Part 2 – The struggles

Over the past four decades, these mantras have translated into a succession of projects all presented as turning points, technically ambitious, politically endorsed but also, often, very expensive.

Digital transformation projects such as SGML, launched in 1987 and deployed under the governance of ISO’s Information Technology Strategy Implementation Group (ITSIG), XML initially launched in 2003 as an authoring and metadata initiative under the same ITSIG, relaunched later in 2011, and ISO/IEC SMART Standards launched in 20185 all aimed to make standards more machine‑readable and reusable, and to allow the development of high‑value products and services.

As such, the objectives of the ISO/IEC SMART Standards project are not new. The SGML project was launched 40 years ago with the same ambitions. In the early 2000, some 25 years ago, ITSIG already supported an XML project with, as an objective, to make “Standards consumers benefit from the possibility of acquiring “intelligent” products of ISO’s intellectual property”.6 At the time, the project included standards published in SGML and XML, in the form of databases accessible on-line, or as “intranet” products as described at the time.

However, these projects have so far delivered mainly internal efficiency gains, such as more structured content, more automated publishing workflows and more sophisticated back‑office systems. If they helped improving user experience (platforms to browse standards, ePub versions of standards, redline versions highlighting changes between editions, or bundling of PDFs), these remain incremental enhancements to the “publish and sell” model, not the expected structural business model transformation or “disruption”. Reality is, little has changed:

• Revenue sources have only marginally diversified, the sales of standards still dominate.

• The portfolio of products and services derived from standards content has barely evolved.

• Subscriptions to standards still represented a relatively small share of the total sales of standards in many organizations.

• Even basic user expectations such as easy remote and offline access to standards content are still not consistently addressed.

• Approaches to copyright, copyright exploitation and commercial policies remain unchanged.

To be fair, several standards bodies have invested heavily in modern online stores and discovery platforms, with a better experience and improved search, personalized recommendations and management of standards collections. However in practice, most of them still sell PDFs and licences one by one or in bulk, with essentially the same transactional logic as before. The user interface and experience may have improved, but the underlying relationship with customers and the risk profile of revenues has barely changed.

Another example is provided by machine‑readable pilots. Many organizations have funded pilots to convert small sets of standards into structured, machine‑interpretable information. If such demonstrations are often technically convincing and generate enthusiastic presentations about future use cases, very few so far have resulted into stable, scalable offerings with a clear pricing model, the support required and an agreed governance and maintenance framework. They remain projects, not products, with their costs absorbed by the existing model.

It is instructive to recall ISO’s first business model workshop, held in Geneva in June 2013, and which ended with a broad consensus among national standards bodies that it was “time to act and innovate”. The concerns expressed at the time were not fundamentally different from those expressed today: the rapid development of technologies, in particular the strong growth of mobile internet traffic and access to information from new devices, the dematerialisation of content, the rise of subscription models, the spread of flexible copyright and licensing approaches such as Creative Commons, the impact of the sharing economy, and increasing calls for free access to standards. In other words, the diagnosis has been on the table for at least a decade.

The IEC followed a parallel path. In 2017, its General Assembly approved a formal strategy to leverage digital technologies for new products and services, four years after ISO's own workshop. The years 2018 to 2020 were spent converting standards into XML and building together with ISO the Online Standards Development (OSD) authoring platform. A dedicated “SMART” task force was established in 2021 and a Digital Transformation Officer hired, and in 2023 the IEC Board approved a new round of investment7. By 2025, institutional communications on the IEC's digital journey were still celebrating the milestones (XML conversion, OSD adoption, SMART pilots) without mention of business models, funding structures, demand dynamics or copyright strategy.

How is it, then, that despite numerous workshops, projects, pilots and “digital” developments, all representing substantial investments, the business model of standards bodies has remained essentially intact, and their financial position, in many cases, now more fragile than ever? Let’s try to understand what is at the heart of these struggles.

Part 3 – The business model confusion

A first part of the problem is the systematic confusion around what a business model is. In most standards bodies, which are mostly not‑for‑profit or public entities, “business” is instinctively translated into “commercial”, which is then reduced to “selling”. These are almost taboo words in environments that essentially define themselves primarily through public‑interest missions. The result is that discussions about business model innovation tend to quickly narrow to the commercial side of the value chain and, ultimately, to the question of “selling PDFs”, as if this were the only business issue worth considering.

In reality, as illustrated above, standards bodies operate a much richer model than this single revenue mechanism.

Now let’s take a widely used definition of “business model”:

“A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”

Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation, John Wiley & Sons, 20108

and apply it to our specific case:

How do standards bodies create value?

First and foremost, standards bodies create value by organizing complex, multi‑stakeholder processes that turn fragmented practices, competing interests and emerging technologies into coherent, widely accepted standards. This involves curating expert communities, providing governance and procedures that ensure fairness and help the building of consensus, maintaining a neutral space where governments, industry and civil society can converge on “one way of doing things” instead of many incompatible ones. The outcome is not the document as such, but reduced transaction costs, interoperability, risk reduction and market access for users of standards, which in turn support innovation, trade, safety and trust.

How do standards bodies deliver value?

The value is delivered in different ways: participation in technical committees, formal publication of standards, guidance, training, certification, or digital platforms that embed standards in tools and workflows. The text of standards is one visible delivery mechanism, but so are the processes supporting technical committee work themselves, where early information, participation and influence are part of the “benefit”, as well as education and support for implementation that help organizations translate the requirements in standards into practice.

How do standards bodies capture value?

Standards bodies capture value through both revenue streams and institutional support of the infrastructure: membership fees, participation fees, public funding or grants, sales and licensing of standards and related publications, revenue from training and certification. For several international, regional and national bodies, the sales and licensing of standards are a major, sometimes dominant, source of income, often justified as the mechanism that finances standards development work and maintenance “in a neutral environment”. But, importantly, revenues from sales of standards are complemented by less visible forms of capture of value in the form of political capital, strategic relevance and regulatory reliance, which translate into long‑term legitimacy and continued stakeholder commitment.

Developing versus selling standards

Developing standards and selling standards are conceptually two different activities within the same business model. Development is an upstream, collaborative knowledge‑production and governance activity (experts meet, draft, negotiate and agree on content under the organization’s rules, with costs in staff, infrastructure, IT and coordination). Selling or licensing standards is a downstream monetization mechanism (packaging and distribution of the intellectual output of the development process, transformed into a financial resource that, depending on the organization, will subsidise the upstream work). Simply put, it is the development which is about creating the value proposition, selling is only one way (even if, historically, it became dominant for major standards bodies) of capturing part of that value to pay for the system. In that respect, the development of standards is the core business of standards bodies. This sounds obvious but tends to be forgotten, probably for the precise reason that it is so obvious, a problem that is well illustrated by the following example:

Let’s take the recent statement of CEN and CENELEC9 mentioned in the introduction:

“We centered our discussions on a bold new value proposition: transitioning away from a traditional, document-led model toward a dynamic model centred around added-value digital standardization services.”

If CEN and CENELEC’s statement seems aligned with the desire to move beyond a “document‑led” model, in our terms, it treats documents and the services wrapped around them as the core business rather than questioning the deeper logic of the role of the organization, who is served, how, and who pays. In that sense, the result risks to be more like a digitally flavoured extension of the existing model than the bold new transformation it claims to bring.

Selling standards is not the business model

Following up on the last point, selling standards is a revenue model. It is not the business model of standards bodies in Osterwalder’s sense. The business model of standards bodies is the overall logic by which they use their governance role, convening power, intellectual property and brand trust to create global public goods (the standards) and to sustain this as a system over time. Within that broad model, retail or subscription sales and licensing are specific mechanisms for capturing the value, alongside membership contributions, public funding, donors funding and other services.

Why is this confusion a problem?

First, it results that in most of the discussions in standards bodies around “business model innovation”, terms such as business model, revenue model, financial model and funding model are used interchangeably, as if they referred to the same thing. But they do not. When an organization fails to distinguish clearly between these notions, it becomes very difficult to diagnose its problems correctly, let alone design credible solutions.

Second, the current tension in standardization is precisely that a business model built heavily on selling access to documents is colliding with policy moves and user expectations for easy access. Thing is, standards bodies often ignore the broader ways in which they capture value through their core role as neutral, high‑value standards development organization, and keep focusing almost exclusively on the sale of content. And when a standards body says “our business model is under threat because we may have to make certain standards freely available”, what is meant is that a pillar of the funding structure is under pressure. The business model, understood as the design of customer relationships, value propositions and services, may in fact not have been seriously questioned at all.

All this has three major negative effects:

1. It encourages defensive strategies. If every discussion about changing formats, access or pricing is immediately defined as a threat to “the business model”, the organization becomes locked into preserving existing revenue streams rather than exploring alternative ways of creating and capturing value.

2. It hides the possibility that the overall funding of the organization might legitimately evolve. For example, through a different mix of public funding, membership structures and fees, or support from donors, while the commercial side is adapted to new market realities.

3. It leads to misplaced optimism. Incremental changes in distribution, pricing or upstream or downstream exploitation of intellectual property are presented as “business model innovation” when they are, at best, adjustments to one component of a much broader funding landscape. And the business model as such remains unchanged.

As we all know it very well in standardization, a rigorous vocabulary forces rigorous thinking. When standards bodies acknowledge that their business model is about how they operate at large, as market‑facing organizations, and that their funding model is about how the entire institution is financed, they can start asking sharper questions: which activities should be primarily funded by the market, and which ones should be recognized as public goods, which customer segments are we really serving, and with what value propositions, how dependent do we want to remain on document sales as a funding source, and what trade‑offs are we willing to accept if that dependence is reduced. The last two questions to which, interestingly, both the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in 1999, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2007, answered by making their standards freely available, making them today more robust to the pressures identified in part 1 (which doesn’t mean that it is necessarily the model other standards bodies have to follow, as both organizations have their own specificities).

To summarize, without this conceptual clarity, “business model innovation” risks remaining what it often is today, a label for technology projects and marginal pricing tweaks. But with it, standards bodies can start to separate the political debate about who ought to pay for standardization from the strategic debate about how they can credibly operate as service providers in an evolving market.

Part 4 – History of standards sales

When talking about business models in standardization, it is essential to remember that the sale of standards is not a natural feature of the system. Over a century, standards bodies went through various phases for the dissemination and monetization of their work, often without reviewing their institutional role.

In the early decades of standardization, standards bodies were mostly technical associations or semi‑public institutions. Their activities were funded primarily through membership fees, government contributions and, in some cases, direct support from chambers of commerce or industry associations. Standards were often distributed at low cost or even free of charge to members and public authorities. Where prices existed, they were more a cost‑recovery mechanism than a carefully designed commercial offer. The main logic here was that the real “value” lay in the participation and influence in the development of standards, not in the physical document.

This explains the origins of the highly criticized “price per page” still used by most organizations to determine the price of a standard. For example, at ISO at the time, a price of CHF 225 (around USD 280) was charged to national standards bodies members of the organization for the reproduction of original ISO standards for sale. This price was simply calculated on the actual costs of offset‑printing one page: composition, plates, ink, paper and overheads. (A quick note to say that, crude as it is, “price per page” has one practical virtue: it provides a consistent, objective baseline, something that can’t be said for value-based pricing, whose theoretical appeal disappear quickly when confronted with the extreme diversity of standards users and their different willingness to pay).

From the 1960s to the 1980s, industrial development, international trade and the growing role of standards in procurement and regulation began to change this structure. Globalization fundamentally transformed the role and importance of standards by embedding them deep into the global trade system. The Tokyo Round’s “Standards Code” in the 1970s was a first step, a plurilateral agreement recognizing technical regulations and standards as potential non‑tariff barriers to trade and encouraging the use of international standards, but only among a subset of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) parties and without a strong legal presumption in their favour. The Uruguay Round in the 1980s–1990s transformed it into the multilateral Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), binding on all members of the organization. By introducing that, where relevant international standards exist, they should be used as a basis for domestic technical regulations unless clearly inappropriate, the TBT Agreement created a powerful legal and political pull toward ISO, IEC and other standards bodies, national and sectoral, all benefiting from open markets and a strong presumption of convergence.

Treating standards incorporated by reference (IBR) primarily as a marketing funnel, as many standards bodies implicitly do, underestimates their nature as public goods and the political and legal obligations that follow from regulatory reliance. The central question is not how to turn IBR content into a freemium “loss leader”, but how to fund this public‑good function explicitly through transparent arrangements with regulators and other beneficiaries, instead of concealing it behind cross‑subsidies from shrinking document sales.

This explains why it is only since the 1980s that the number of standards produced has exploded, and with it the revenues from their sale. OECD’s case study on ISO similarly describes the rapid development of ISO’s standards catalogue and influence following the opening of markets and the requirement from the WTO TBT to use international standards as a basis for regulation, confirming that today’s sales based funding model is for a large part a by‑product of globalization and regulatory reliance, not the outcome of a intentional business strategy.

While talking about ISO, interestingly, these revenues were further increased with the publication, in 1987, of the first edition of its quality management standard ISO 9001. Applicable across sectors, the standard became widely required in tenders and supply chains, selling at hundreds of thousands of copies, turning a single document family into a big, global, revenue engine.

In this new context, charging for standards evolved from a secondary practice into a central revenue source. The sales of printed standards, catalogues and related publications became a major pillar of funding for many organizations. But this shift was a consequence, a reaction, rather than planned. Standards bodies simply surfed the wave of demand created by the liberalization of trade and the delegation by governments of the technical rule‑making to private and semi‑private standards and regulatory bodies10, rather than deliberately redesign their business models.

The 1990s saw a first wave of “digital” transformation centred on formats and distribution. The conversion of printed documents to PDF and the launch of online stores allowed standards bodies to scale the distribution of standards at lower marginal cost and offer immediate access, while the introduction of print‑on‑demand reduced inventory and logistics costs. These changes professionalized the publishing side of international and national standards bodies, making them look more and more like a conventional publishing businesses.

As the decade progressed, licensing and access models diversified. Corporate subscriptions, multi-user licences, site licences, platforms and reseller agreements with commercial distributors became more common. Some standards bodies invested in certification and training as complementary revenue streams, leveraging their brand and the content of their standards. But despite this diversification, the core logic remained broadly unchanged, with standards treated as proprietary texts, and access to those texts the main lever to generate income.

From a business model perspective, three points are important to keep in mind:

• The centrality of standards sales revenues emerged by opportunity, not by design. Sales became central to funding not through a deliberate strategy, but as an opportunistic response to global trade expansion and to the regulatory reliance created by instruments such as the WTO TBT Agreement. Today, the capacity to generate substantial revenue from sales still depends on open markets and on regulators’ continued reliance on these specific conditions which can no longer be taken for granted. Discussions on business model transformation and financial sustainability must take this element in consideration.

• Commercial activities were layered onto institutions designed for something else. Selling standards was never the original core purpose of standards bodies, and it is still not the core business of standards bodies. Commercial activities, even where they are central to funding, remain heavily constrained by the primary culture and governance structures of standards development. This explains why the commercial imagination of standards bodies did not expand at the same pace as their technical capabilities, and why investments in projects such as SGML, XML or SMART Standards did not translate into new, robust revenue models. Heritage and the legacy of past choices weighs heavily: institutional cultures, organizational structures, IT architectures, contractual arrangements and stakeholder expectations have all been shaped by decades of treating standards as “publish‑and‑sell” products.

• If the current funding structure is the result of a specific external context, the present difficulties of standards bodies are not just due to exogenous factors. They result from a long‑term trajectory in which the commercialization of standards documents gradually became central to financing the system, without a parallel effort to develop a broader, more flexible and more robust business model. Understanding that this configuration is contingent is a precondition to imagine credible, more sustainable, alternatives to the current model.

Part 5 – Market (mis)understanding

The history, as presented in the previous part, and the consequences of the liberalization of trade had a huge impact on how standards bodies think about their “market”. Combined with regulatory reliance and the spectacular success of a few generic standards (above all ISO 9001, with millions of copies distributed and millions of certificates issued worldwide at its peak), it created with standards bodies the impression that standards could be treated, and managed, like normal commercial products. For a time, this impression was reinforced by very real numbers: growing catalogues of standards, rising sales, and a sense that there was always another “best-seller” to be developed. From this experience, many standards bodies drew four lessons:

1. They came to believe they could become commercial entities like any other. The surge in demand for widely applicable management standards suggested that standardization could be run as a scalable publishing business, with the same professional sales, marketing and product management one can find in businesses, driving growth. In some organizations, this translated into ambitions and structures similar to conventional information businesses. In some cases, people were hired directly from large and famous information companies, even though the underlying institutional mandate and governance remained those of a public‑interest body, driven by a standards development culture.

2. Standards began to be treated as if they were consumer goods. If ISO 9001 could be “sold” in very large volumes across sectors and countries, why not stimulate the demand for other standards through promotion, discount or bundling in the hope of boosting sales? This view assumes that the demand for standards is elastic, which it isn’t, and can be nurtured through marketing activities in the same way as for books, software or streaming services. But it hides the reality that most standards serve highly specific, technical purposes, for which the demand is driven by regulatory obligations, contractual requirements or, often ignored, narrow professional needs. For the vast majority of documents, the entire global market may consist of a handful of organizations, sometimes literally two or three copies.

3. The blockbuster success of a few standards encouraged the belief that the key to revenue growth was simply a matter of spotting the next “hot topic” and turning it into a best‑seller. In this framing, the strategic challenge becomes picking the right themes and moving fast: identify emerging areas with a broad appeal, publish a generic framework, and harvest sales. This explains, together with the objective to conduct extensive communication campaigns to promote relevance and modernity, the rise of foresight activities (such as ISO’s Standardization Foresight Framework) to anticipate the need for standards and shortcut the usual bottom‑up cycle, as well as the multiplication of vertical initiatives on fashionable themes like sustainability, climate, carbon reduction, ESG or artificial intelligence. Timing and scope do matter, but this logic undervalues the slower, less visible parts of standardization where documents play critical roles for specific communities, sectors and infrastructures. It also hides how rare cases like ISO 9001 or the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC) really are, and how much their success depended on decades of institutional work to embed them in tenders, supply chains and certification schemes, not just on the intrinsic appeal of the topic. Finally, it assumes that best‑seller revenues will simply accumulate over time, when in reality each standard has its own life cycle and will eventually lose relevance and its ability to generate substantial income.

4. Digitalization is often expected to make standards “more attractive” and to unlock additional willingness to pay. Better portals, more formats, interactive features and, later, digital‑ready or SMART Standards are assumed to increase the perceived value and, by extension, either the volume sold or the price that users are ready to accept. There is so far extremely little, if no, evidence that this has happened at scale. Digital tools have lowered distribution costs and improved usability for some users, but they haven’t changed the basic fact that organizations buy standards because they need to comply, interoperate or demonstrate quality, safety and so on, not because of new features making standards “sexy”.

The underlying mistake in all four beliefs is to treat standards like a mass‑market product. ISO 9001 and a few other widely adopted standards behave, commercially, more like such products: a large potential user base, strong network effects and a visible signalling value. The vast majority of standards, however, look economically like niche, specialist goods. For them the addressable markets are tiny, the scope is limited for stimulating demand, and there is extremely low elasticity with respect to price or marketing. No amount of promotion will ever turn a standard with a natural market of five users into a standard with a market of five hundred.

The vast majority of standards resemble long‑tail, niche products whose markets are structurally too small to sustain a classic “sell more units” strategy. For organizations with large catalogues across many technical sectors, these niche and historical standards together form a long tail that can, over their combined life‑cycles, generate more revenue than a handful of best‑sellers even though none of them, taken individually, looks commercially attractive.

This misreading of the market has two consequences. First, it creates unrealistic expectations about what commercialisation can achieve, leading to repeated disappointment when new “offers” fail to improve revenues.

Anecdote has it that a newly appointed ISO Secretary-General once remarked that, since almost every citizen in his country owned a bicycle, ISO's standards on bicycles must be selling like hot cakes. His excitement faded quickly when it appeared that only five bicycle manufacturers operated in that market, limiting the potential sales to five copies each.

Second, it diverts the attention away from the real strategic question which is not “how do we sell more copies of more standards?” but “how do we fund and govern a catalogue that, by design, contains a few blockbusters and a very long tail of low‑volume, high‑importance documents?”.

Part 6 – The obsession with digital transformation

The two words “digital transformation” appear so relentlessly in slide decks, strategy documents, workshops and conference programmes that they are now less a analytical concept and more a way to promote an organization as modern and on‑trend. Standards bodies are no exception. Like many others, they speak the language of platforms, data, APIs and AI, and are tempted to label almost any project as part of their digital transformation. This makes it harder to distinguish genuine change from basic IT modernization, and blurs an important distinction.

Digitalization is the use of IT to automate or streamline existing processes within an unchanged business model, like ATMs in banking or self‑check‑in at airports. In the standards world, online stores, XML‑based production workflows, online authoring tools, corporate access models or “digital libraries” are all examples of digitalization.

Digital transformation, by contrast, involves using technology to explore new business models or markets, redesign core processes, or develop entirely new products and services. It is about changing how an organization creates and captures value, not just upgrading the tools it uses.

Most of what is currently labelled “digital transformation” by standards bodies clearly belongs to the first category. These projects automate and polish the existing “sell‑the‑document” model, improving efficiency and user experience, while the underlying logic remains the same: a standard is something you buy. They can be useful and sometimes necessary, but they do not change who the customers are, what is being sold, or how value is fundamentally created and captured. Presenting such steps as “transformative” confuses basic modernization with genuine business‑model innovation and creates a comfortable, but misleading, sense of progress.

The vagueness of the term “digital transformation” has also created an extremely fertile environment for self‑proclaimed experts, success stories of varying credibility and consulting offers that promise change while staying safely within the comfort zone of existing structures. Standards bodies are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic. Their leaders rarely have hands‑on experience with the latest digital technologies, yet face strong external pressure to demonstrate that their organization is “keeping up”. In this context, it is tempting to launch high‑visibility projects (new authoring tools, AI pilots, experimental “labs”) that promotes modernity without forcing uncomfortable discussions about governance, processes, access, pricing or funding.

Two recent documents illustrate how standards bodies tend to frame “digital transformation” primarily as an information‑structuring problem. The “Writing Digital‑Ready Standards” guide from the Digital Standards Alliance offers a practical set of drafting rules designed to make standards more compatible with parsers, machine‑learning models and text‑to‑data conversion tools. AFNOR’s white paper on the “Development of Semantic Interoperability in the Standardization Ecosystem” takes a more strategic view, calling for a data‑oriented strategy at ISO and IEC, formal governance of semantic domains, and new products and services built around ontologies and semantic profiles.

In both cases, the underlying question (what economic and institutional role standards bodies actually wish to play in a fragmented digital ecosystem) remains largely untouched. The DSA document promises “digital‑ready” standards by refining sentence‑level drafting and table structures. On its side, the AFNOR white paper promises semantic interoperability through new governance frameworks, profiles, tools and infrastructure. In both, most of the intellectual effort is invested in how information is structured and managed, rather than in what is being sold, to whom, under which access conditions, and with what allocation of costs and benefits. Or, to put it more bluntly, standards bodies keep polishing the cart before deciding which horses will pull it.

This does not mean that digital projects in standardization are useless or misguided by definition. However, as long as “digital transformation” remains a catch‑all term that can describe both a new authoring tool and a rethinking of who pays for a global coordination infrastructure, the real strategic choices will be postponed and efforts will remain a costly distraction.

Genuine transformation in standardization can only happen after facing questions that technology alone cannot answer: which aspects of standardization should be treated as public goods, how far to go in opening access to content that regulators and markets depend on, how to fund and govern shared semantic resources, how to combine human expertise with technology without diluting accountability or trust.

The challenge is not to produce more “digital” slides or to organize another “inspiring” workshop covered in coloured Post‑its, but to decide what kind of standardization system we want in a digital age, and only then use technology to serve that choice.

Part 7 – When inspiration comes from the wrong benchmarks

Let’s now take two examples to show how the “(mis)understanding of the market” described in part 5 and the “obsession with digital transformation” discussed in part 6 have led standards bodies to choose the wrong models as their North Stars. By importing analogies from industries that operate under completely different economics and governance, here the cases of the music industry and autonomous driving, they have ended up steering strategy towards problems that looks glamorous, but are largely irrelevant to the real questions standardization needs to answer.

The Spotify business model for subscriptions to and pricing of standards catalogues, and the SAE International levels of autonomous driving for SMART Standards have both been imported, often uncritically, into standardization strategy decks, workshops and project proposals, as if they provided ready‑made roadmaps for business innovation. But they do not, and if they have offered a convenient storytelling, they have led standards bodies to invest time and money taking the wrong direction.

Why the Spotify and music industry analogy misleads

Seen from the outside, the success of ISO 9001 and a handful of other “blockbusters”, and the increasing size of the catalogues of major standards bodies, made it tempting to think of standards as an intellectual property catalogue similar to a music label’s catalogue. If some standards can be sold in large volumes across sectors and countries, like The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Rihanna sold millions of records across the globe, why not imagine a streaming‑style model: a platform, a subscription, and the unlimited access to the standards catalogue?

Well, the analogy breaks down as soon as we look at the basic underlying economics:

• The music industry is a mass‑market consumer industry. The addressable market is counted in hundreds of millions of people, a single track can generate revenue through repeated listening over years, and engagement can be stimulated through promotion and curation: the possibility exists that if you listen to David Guetta you might also be interested by Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks interpreted by the Academy of Ancient Music under the direction of Christopher Hogwood.

• The standards “industry” is a narrow, institutional market. Most standards have very small, highly specialized user communities. Demand is driven by regulation, contracts and technical necessity, not by taste or curiosity: it is unlikely that if you are a cybersecurity expert you might ever be interested in reading a standard on the determination of fat content in milk products and milk-based foods by the Weibull-Berntrop gravimetric method. A standard is typically bought once, at the moment when an organization needs it, may not be “consumed” again in the ordinary sense, and there is no incentive making that if you need a few standards, access to an entire catalogue of thousands other standards. This explains why it is so difficult to shift standards users from transactional purchases to subscription models, and why one-off sales remain by far the dominant revenue mechanism for most standards bodies.

Spotify’s catalogue is like walking into a music store. Everything is a variation on the same basic product, tracks and albums aimed at a mass audience. By contrast, a catalogue of standards is more like a supermarket where spinach, toothbrushes and car accessories coexist on the same shelves. A few items are bought by almost everyone, but most are highly specialized products for tiny, unrelated niches that will never behave like a single, mass‑market offering. If supermarkets worked like Spotify, you would pay a flat monthly fee and walk out with anything you wanted. In reality, even in a warehouse club (like Costco) you still go through the checkout.

In music, streaming platforms are solving a large convenience gap and, in doing so, created a new way to monetize attention and data at scale. In standardization, the convenience gap is real but is much smaller. The core problems for users are legal certainty, stable referencing, integration into worflows and tools and clear semantics, not the lack of a slick portal. There is no mass market to unlock, and almost no price elasticity to exploit. For the vast majority of standards, no amount of promotion or bundling will turn a natural market of a few dozen users into a market of thousands.

Focusing on “capturing greater market share and fighting piracy” still assumes there is a large, untapped discretionary market for standards consumption, similar to music. In reality, the harder problem is not selling more units, but securing sustainable funding for a mandated coordination infrastructure whose demand is driven by regulation, risk and interoperability. Treating this primarily as a volume game, rather than as a public‑goods and funding problem, is a grave misunderstanding of the standards business.

From a broad perspective, the music industry is a very poor parallel for the standards ecosystem. And when standards bodies think about adopting the Spotify model, they implicitly buy into the idea that their challenge is to stimulate demand and maximise usage of a catalogue, instead of recognising that for most standards there is a structurally small, inelastic market. Focus then is on the size of the catalogue, portal user interface and subscription packaging, rather than on the question raised previously: how to fund a long tail of low‑volume but high‑importance standards that will never behave like consumer products.

If there is one lesson standards bodies can take from the music industry, it is not to repeat the labels’ early mistakes. When peer‑to‑peer sharing emerged, the response was heavy‑handed DRM (Digital Rights Management) and legal crackdowns that punished legitimate users, degraded the experience and failed to stop piracy. Two decades later, most of those protections have been abandoned because the market rejected them. Standards bodies risk making the same error if they continue to respond to digital use and new technologies by tightening technical and legal controls rather than by rethinking how openness, partnerships and new service models can support both access and funding.

Why the levels of autonomous driving are a poor model for standards

The other benchmark used by standards bodies is the levels of driving automation defined by SAE International, which ISO’s Technical Management Board Strategic Advisory Group on Machine Readable Standards (ISO/TMB SAG MRS) used as a mental model for SMART Standards. For those not familiar with these levels, they describe increasing degrees of real‑time control of a vehicle, from full human control to full machine control. Have a look at following picture, courtesy of SAE International, and you will find a striking similarity with the five levels of SMART Standards:

Transposed to standardization, the concept is to move:

1. From traditional physical paper standards, not machine‑actionable (Level 0);

2. From Level 0 to digital documents (PDF), enabling search but minimal machine interpretation (Level 1);

3. From Level 1 to machine‑readable, structured content (for example XML), where software can understand elements such as chapters, graphics, and the separation of content from presentation (Level 2);

4. From Level 2 to machine‑readable content with granular information, where requirements can be automatically processed by software (Level 3);

5. And, finally, from Level 3 to machine‑interpretable content linked directly to application data, enabling automated execution and compliance checks within digital systems (Level 4).

In this dynamic, humans progressively step aside as machines “take over” the use of standards. This is a misleading way to think about what standards are for, because it reduces them to rule engines applied to data. Reality is that standardization is a socio‑technical process that formalizes negotiated compromises, context‑dependent interpretations, and explicit allocations of responsibility. In many domains (safety, health, environment, finance, trade), regulators and professionals are expected to exercise judgement, not to outsource it wholesale to automated systems. SMART automation may be attractive and useful for a subset of highly formalizable documents but it cannot be a universal destination as the project is presented.

The SMART model also devalues Level 0 and Level 1 uses of standards in a subtle manner, as if they were inherently inferior or “not yet good enough” simply because they are less automated, even when they may already be high‑quality, appropriate products in their own right. The ladder now accepted, standards bodies adopt a narrative in which anything below “machine‑interpretable” looks backward and the only legitimate direction is “more automation”, encouraging investment in levels before answering more fundamental questions. Presentations about SMART Standards tend to systematically start with a statement that basically says something like “PDF is dead”, without any argument and serious studies to support it.

SMART Standards is also routinely presented as a “digital transformation journey” for standards bodies, backed by familiar declarations that current processes and products are outdated and unattractive to “a new generation of experts and users”, that existing offerings no longer fit the “digital world”, and that, as the quote attributed to Henry Ford suggests, users would only ever ask for “faster horses”. The problem is that these claims are not grounded in any serious market research or user studies. They are broad assertions, largely fuelled by quotes from tech gurus, generic consultancy reports, hype on social media and anecdotes exchanged with colleagues over drinks after conferences and workshops.

How these benchmarks distort strategy

Taken together, the Spotify analogy and the levels of autonomous driving point in the same wrong direction. They encourage standards bodies to see standards mainly as digital content to package, stream and automate. In the Spotify story, success is about catalogue size, subscriptions and pricing. In the autonomy story, it is about racing from human‑readable to fully machine‑interpretable standards and constantly worrying about “which level are we at?”.

In both cases, standards stop being what they really are: shared institutional commitments and ways of working, anchored in legal, organizational and political arrangements, with a few “hits” and a long tail of specialised, low‑volume documents. The practical effects are concrete. Money and attention flow into large digital projects, licensing tricks, SMART “levels” and technical layers, while the main strategic questions remain unanswered.

This brings us back to the “obsession with digital transformation” discussed above. Standards bodies fear their own “Kodak moment”, while overlooking that Kodak’s downfall was not about missing a technology, but about failing to rethink its business model and strategic choices. As a result, their strategic priorities and investments often look more like gambles than well‑reasoned decisions. Later in this article, we will see that recent public statements by standards bodies tend to confirm this pattern.

A last but important point. Being sceptical about these benchmarks is not a rejection of learning from other industries. It is a refusal to let seductive metaphors replace hard thinking about the specific political economy of standardization and a realistic understanding of its market. The IFAN International Standards Users Survey 2025 underlines the growing distance between standards bodies and standards users. Spotify and the SAE ladder may be useful stories in other contexts, but they have been poor guides for designing viable, fair and legitimate models for standards bodies, especially when it comes to addressing users’ actual needs.

Part 8 – Other barriers to business model innovation

Even if standards bodies understood their markets perfectly and had the “right” ideas on the table, business model innovation would still run into a thick wall of internal barriers. These barriers are the product of how standards bodies have been organized over decades and have become cultural. Innovation and agility are often praised in rhetoric, but pursued cautiously in practice, with ambitious ideas carefully filtered out before they reach decision‑makers. In the context discussed in this article, some of the most important barriers include:

A risk‑averse culture by design

Standards aim to reduce risk for others. It is therefore natural that standards bodies tend to avoid taking risk themselves. Success is often defined as “no surprises”, “no controversy”, “no complaints”. In this culture, bold changes in business model (new access rules, different pricing logic, open partnerships) will almost systematically be considered as dangerous experiments. The safest option is nearly always to keep doing what has been done before, the “status quo”, even when it is acknowledged that it is not sustainable.

A defensive culture and fear of loss

Because existing revenues and copyright protection are perceived as fragile, the default position is defensive rather than exploratory. The primary instinct is to protect what exists (current revenue streams, control over content, established stakeholder balances) rather than to test new ways of creating value. What matters is keep the pie instead of increasing the size of the pie. Proposals are first examined through the lens of “what might we lose?”, often supported by long risk‑assessment documents, while far less effort goes into articulating potential gains. This bias is reinforced by the fact that any short‑term dip in revenue is immediate, visible and attributable, whereas the benefits of experimentation are uncertain, delayed and harder to credit to specific decisions.

A culture of consensus making saying “no” difficult

Consensus is essential for developing technical content, but when it is extended to strategic or commercial decisions it becomes a brake. In consensus‑based organizations, saying “no” to new projects or stopping those that don’t deliver almost never happens. Projects can linger for years, be reframed, renamed or modestly reshaped, with ambitions progressively reduced yet still implemented at cost, even when everyone knows the expected benefits are marginal. This happens partly because each stakeholder expects to see their priorities reflected, and partly because no one wants to make the sponsors of a project look bad by blocking or ending it. Often, project governance is reviewed and the landscape fills with working groups and task forces, with limited focus and little scope, and in which everyone must be brought on board and invited to comment, to shift resources away from what does not work towards what might.

A member‑driven culture, not a customer‑driven one

Standards bodies are governed by their members: international or national organizations, ministries, industry associations and large companies. These actors are essential, but they are not necessarily representative of standards users, especially smaller firms, downstream actors, or users in other demographics or regions. In many standards bodies, a recurring discussion about “who are our customers?” almost always ends, after long debates, with “our members” as the implicit answer, described as the “blood” or “lifeblood” of the organization.

As a result projects, particularly those related to business models or digital transformation, tend to prioritize individual member interests over benefits to end users, even when user‑focused improvements would ultimately create more value for the organization and its members as a whole.

The IFAN International Standards Users Survey 2025 highlights persistent friction for users around cost, copyright and licensing, weak support for standards management, integration problems with their own systems, and a strong need for multilingual content, yet these issues are often missing from strategies. In a member‑driven system, it is easier and more immediately rewarding to align with member expectations than to redesign offerings around end‑user needs.

Inclusive structures that slow everything down

Inclusiveness is a strength in the technical work but has a cost in strategic and commercial decisions. The need to bring everyone on board (members, committees, internal departments, etc.) before taking a step in a new direction systematically slows the decision-making process and progress, and often drive to results that are a compromise among all participants. A business model experiment that would be run in months in a small firm can take years to negotiate and approve in a large standards body. During that time, market conditions and user expectations move on, making the final decision less relevant when it finally arrives.

Policy and legal constraints that limit flexibility and opportunities

Many standards bodies operate under public‑law or quasi‑public frameworks, with strict rules on procurement, staffing, budgeting and pricing. Some are legally constrained in the types of commercial activities they can pursue or the partnerships they are allowed to form. Copyright and access policies, designed to protect revenue and safeguard the integrity of documents, often make it difficult to experiment with alternative models or to work with intermediaries who could reach users and regions the organization cannot serve effectively on its own. These constraints do not make innovation impossible, but they do significantly narrow the range of options that can realistically be considered, and limit the impact that new initiatives and projects can ultimately have.

Decentralised systems and fragmented incentives

Responsibilities and incentives in standards bodies are often divided between the central organization, technical committees, stakeholders and various third parties. The value created by a centrally run project can only be fully realized if many heterogeneous local actors adopt and use its outputs, despite large differences in status, resources and capabilities. In practice, no single actor is clearly rewarded for managing strategic risk, and there are few mechanisms to recognize those who try. With weak accountability for outcomes, it is easier to launch new initiatives than to consolidate, scale or stop existing ones.

Closed culture around copyright and control

For decades, strict copyright enforcement and tight control over distribution have been treated as non‑negotiable principles. This has produced restrictive licences, implementation of DRM and very cautious attitudes toward reuse or partnerships with aggregators and software vendors. As I explain in The Anthropic ruling, or when the going gets tough, these policies have not stopped infringement. They have mainly burdened legitimate users, constrained experimentation and left many regions and user segments under‑served. Investments in enforcement have not delivered measurable returns, and they have not resulted in increased revenues. Yet, the instinct is still to tighten control, rather than to explore how greater openness and controlled reuse could be developed into strategic assets.

To be fair, taken together, these cultural and structural barriers do not stop innovation entirely but they channel it into low‑risk areas: the new tools, the new formats, the new committees and slogans that we discussed, and that leave the underlying business logic largely untouched. As long as these barriers remain unaddressed, efforts at business model innovation will continue to move between ambition on paper and caution in practice. The main challenge is therefore not only to design different models, but to reshape the internal conditions (governance, incentives, mindsets) under which such models can genuinely be tested, learned from and, when they work, scaled. In that context, strong leadership is critical.

Part 9 – Where are we now?

Taken together, the previous sections describe a situation where standards bodies have moved far, but not necessarily in the directions that matter most for their long‑term viability. They have modernized tools, expanded their catalogues, and launched numerous digital initiatives. Yet, the core economic and institutional logic of standardization has changed remarkably little. To summarize what we covered so far:

• On the revenue side, the system still depends heavily on selling access to standards and related products, a model that emerged opportunistically from globalization and regulatory reliance rather than deliberate design. A few blockbusters such as ISO 9001 or ASME BPVC created the illusion that standards could be managed like consumer products, but most of the catalogue behaves like a long tail of niche, low‑volume goods that cannot sustain a “sell more units” strategy.

• On the business‑model side, the line between what standards bodies do and how they fund it remains blurred. “Business model innovation” often still means “protecting or replacing revenues from PDF sales”, rather than rethinking who the customers are, what is offered to them, and how value is captured beyond documents. Digital projects have mainly improved internal efficiency and usability, without shifting the center of gravity from selling documents to supporting the use, the implementation and the integration of standards.

• On the market side, many organizations still misread demand. They assume it can be stimulated and scaled like in software, whereas most standards serve small, specialized user groups whose needs are driven by obligation, risk and interoperability, not by marketing. Because customers are only weakly involved in these projects, keeping treating standards as consumer goods has led to misplaced expectations and investments, while leaving unresolved how to fund the long tail of “unattractive” but critical standards.

• On the digital side, transformation is often reframed as an information structuring or tooling issue. “Digital‑ready” drafting guides and semantic‑interoperability papers are useful, but they mostly address how content is written, structured and governed, not the underlying choices about access, openness, partnerships and the respective roles of public and private actors. The grammar of transformation (XML, APIs, ontologies, SMART Standards) is advancing faster than the transformation itself.

• On the institutional side, deep‑seated cultural and structural constraints limit what is feasible. Risk‑averse cultures, consensus processes that make it hard to say “no”, member‑driven governance that keeps users at a distance, public‑sector rules, defensive attitudes to copyright and control, and fragmented incentives all favour continuity over change. Innovation exists, but it is often channelled into safer, less disruptive domains.

In short, standards bodies find themselves in a paradoxical situation. Never have their outputs been more central to regulation, trade, sustainability, safety and digital infrastructures, never has the rhetoric of business model innovation and digital transformation been more prominent. Yet the underlying way in which they create, deliver and capture value remains close to the model that emerged in the late twentieth century, at a time of expanding globalization and unquestioned dependence on paid access to documents. The result is a system that is both indispensable and financially fragile, technologically more sophisticated but strategically hesitant, and increasingly squeezed between political expectations, user needs, and internal constraints that make bold moves difficult.

Recent conversations and workshops make the abstract arguments of this article very concrete, and place many representatives in an increasingly uncomfortable position. In presentations, webinars and conferences on “business model innovation” and “digital transformation”, several participants have been strikingly candid, admitting “we do not know where we are going” or “we are in the dark”. This points to stress, fatigue and a strong sense of resignation after significant dedication and effort have been invested in projects that ultimately fail to deliver substantial results. It becomes clear that organizations are going round in circles.

At one workshop, the CEO a national standards body, in front of many other present, argued that XML appeared “too slow, complex, risky or expensive” and called for “something else”. It expressed a deeper frustration that large investments in technology have not translated into clear value propositions for members and users. A major issue is that instead of starting from use cases and funding logic and then choosing the tools, standards bodies reverse the sequence: technology is acquired first, and only then do organizations begin to ask what they might actually do with it.

In a recent webinar, a representative tried to reconcile attachment to paper and PDF with the promise of new formats: “People still want print versions. Some people really want PDFs, but we want to make sure that we are building our standards in a way that lets us still provide print and PDF, but also XML files or future file formats or structures that we haven’t even thought of, but that you need to build a foundation for before you can even consider those changes in the future.” The ambition is to be ready for every possible future format while preserving every legacy channel. Unsurprisingly, this leads to complex, expensive projects whose main objective becomes technological optionality, not a fitter business model.

Another representative framed digital transformation itself as a “philosophical debate”: “You can do nothing, we could still create our standards. We could use Word, we could do the things the way we used to do things. But there will be an inevitable point where that’s no longer sustainable but that may be 10, 15, 20 years down the line.” The choice offered to boards here is between continuing business as usual for another decade or more, or “getting in on the ground level” now to “be a more agile organization” as argued. This says more about the state of the strategic conversation than any slide deck could. What is striking is not the recognition that change will eventually be necessary, but the absence of concrete analysis about where value will come from, who will pay, and which risks are worth taking today.

Similar ambiguities appear in the flip‑charts and whiteboards that follow these discussions. Phrases such as “access to standards”, “fast and agile process”, “different deliverables based on user criteria” or “build products for our community” sit alongside lists of constraints, caveats and unresolved questions. The language of agility, products and user‑centricity is present, but it often remains at the level of aspiration. Underneath, the same unresolved issues persist: how to reconcile access with revenue protection; who should fund common infrastructures; how far to go in opening content that regulators and markets rely on.

In parallel, the SMART Standards project is increasingly framed as an opportunity for technical committees to develop their own “smart standards”. Aside from the lack of clarity about the conditions for development, delivery, pricing and long‑term maintenance of such products, this is not what technical committees are designed or mandated to do. Many experts do not have the product, market or service‑design skills required, and are often poorly placed to understand how end users will actually implement standards in real settings (a government, NGO or civil‑society representative may legitimately wish to influence content, while having little sense of the realities of implementation). It is easy to imagine a future in which the project is declared a success because authoring tools have been deployed, while the responsibility for designing value‑adding products and services has been effectively delegated to technical committees and handled case by case by governance groups, without a coherent overall model.

All together, these exchanges in meetings and workshops illustrate the core dynamic described in this article. Leaders know that “something” has to change and that digital projects cannot be postponed indefinitely, however the discussion remains framed in terms of tools, formats and preparedness for hypothetical futures, rather than explicit choices about business models, funding, and the roles different actors should play.

The context presented in the first part of this article is fundamentally different from the one in which standards bodies have operated over the past 40 years. The recommendations that follow represent an honest and rigorous framing from which genuine strategic choices can be made.

Part 10 – Recommendations

To remain financially sustainable and strategically relevant in the new context, standards bodies need to realign “digital transformation” and business model discussions around a concrete set of decisions and commitments, among which are:

1. Redefine the core offer around standardization activities

• Formally state that the organization’s core offer is to enable and support the development, adoption and effective use of standards, primarily for the benefit of standards users (in the vast majority of cases, industry and its stakeholders). Serving members is a critical condition of that mission, not its primary objective. When users are well served, members benefit as a consequence. Publishing documents is a means to that end, not the end itself.

• Prioritise projects that: (a) make it easier to embed standards into regulation, software and procurement (identifiers, reference data, semantic assets), even if they do not directly increase the sales of document, and (b) improve support to implementation such as impact analysis, guidance, etc.

2. Clarify mandate, business model and funding

• Adopt a formal statement that clearly distinguishes: (a) public‑good functions (governance, coordination, trust for regulators and markets), (b) value‑creating services for specific user segments, and (c) the funding mechanisms associated with each.

• Treat the funding model as a system, not a list of independent revenue lines. Reinforcing one source (for example, document sales) does not automatically strengthen the whole, every source affects the others and the overall risk profile.

• For each major source of income, assess systematically: (a) how sustainable it is under plausible legal, technological and geopolitical scenarios, (b) whether it actually supports the organization’s value‑creating activities, and (c) whether it can be reinforced, extended or diversified without undermining other parts of the system.

• When considering initiatives around sales and licensing, explicitly test whether they improve the long‑term sustainability of the overall business model, given the evolution of other funding sources (public funding, membership, services, partnerships), rather than optimising sales in isolation.

• Classify the standards catalogue into a small number of portfolios (for example, “regulation‑critical standards”, “high‑volume commercial”, “strategic niche/long tail”) and make the funding logic explicit for each, instead of relying on undifferentiated PDF sales to cross‑subsidise everything.

3. Genuinely put users and demand at the center

• Systematically use, update or commission robust user research (surveys, interviews, behavioural and usage data) to understand the needs, pain points and willingness to pay across key segments such as regulators, large firms, SMEs, certification bodies, software vendors and training providers.

• Make this evidence, rather than analogies with other industries or generic “best practices”, the primary baseline for evaluating new initiatives, especially those labelled “digital transformation” or “business model innovation”.

4. Shift from defence to open exploitation of content

• Reaffirm, as a non-negotiable foundation, that copyright ownership and the legitimate right to enforce it constitute the legal and commercial basis on which any open exploitation strategy must be built. What must change is not the ownership of standards content (which should be defended rigorously and without ambiguity) but the policies governing how that content is accessed, distributed, licensed and reused. Confusing the two leads many organizations to treat any loosening of distribution controls as a threat to their rights, when in practice a well-designed open licensing framework strengthens enforceability by making authorised channels more attractive than unauthorised ones, and by creating an auditable record of who is using what, under what terms.

• Explicitly recognise that defensive copyright and tight distribution controls have reached their limits and that: (a) they do not stop illegal distribution, copying or ingestion by AI, (b) they create burdens for legitimate users, and (c) they accelerate the loss of control, visibility and revenue you are trying to avoid.

• Identify which elements of standards must be openly accessible as part of their public‑good function (for example, the text of standards incorporated by reference into legislation or regulation, normative references that must be inspectable, persistent identifiers and versioning, core reference tables such as codes, classifications and units, and the minimal semantic elements needed for unambiguous citation and interoperability) and adopt appropriate, open, licences for these.

• Move from a “walled garden” position to structured openness by expanding purpose‑driven licensing with third parties (aggregators, distributors, software developers, AI providers), using simple, tailored agreements that enable wide reuse of standards content while ensuring traceability, attribution and fair revenue sharing.

• For higher‑value layers (APIs, enriched or derived data, validation and mapping services, integration plug‑ins, compliance and implementation tools), design open but controlled models that make it easy to embed standards into other systems and workflows, while charging for authenticity, reliability, support and advanced functionality rather than for the simple access to PDFs.

• Run time‑limited pilots with alternative access models for selected portfolios (for example, open access to regulation‑critical standards, differentiated or freemium access for specific market segments, broader rights for partners building AI‑based tools), with clear objectives, risk assessments and criteria to decide whether to scale, modify or stop each model.

5. Make the long tail a deliberate, shared responsibility

• Recognize explicitly that maintaining a long tail of economically unattractive but critical standards is a core element of the organization’s public‑interest mandate, not a residual by‑product financed “if blockbusters sell enough PDFs this year”.

• Design blended funding arrangements for this portfolio (targeted public support, regulator contributions, member levies, sponsorship or, where appropriate, philanthropic or mission‑oriented funding).

• Communicate clearly to users, regulators and policymakers what it actually costs to sustain this coordination infrastructure, and what is at risk if it is not funded, instead of assuming that document sales can silently carry it.

6. Embrace coopetition for systemic challenges

• Acknowledge that core challenges such as semantic interoperability, AI‑ready content and horizontal navigation across multiple standards and regulations cannot be solved by any single standards body acting alone. They are not a race to appear the most technologically savvy. Fragmented, stand‑alone initiatives on these issues simply dilute investments, duplicate efforts and are likely to remain unnoticed or unused.

• Develop structured coopetition frameworks where standards bodies, sectoral SDOs, regulators and technology firms jointly invest in shared infrastructures (identifiers, mappings, registries, reference data, cross‑catalogue search) while competing on high‑value services, support and expertise in their sector.

• Recent initiatives such as the aerospace‑led Digital Standards Alliance (DSA) show that large users are prepared to organise and fund pre‑competitive collaboration on digital standards when standards bodies move too slowly or too separately. It articulates many of the right problems (fragmented formats, lack of machine‑interpretable content, duplicated effort) and seek shared solutions across SDOs but, and this is important to note, they do not and cannot answer the questions of funding models, public‑good obligations and the long tail, which remain the responsibility of standards bodies and regulators.

• Prioritise alliances that help users deal with compliance complexity across jurisdictions and regimes, even when this means sharing visibility and revenue with partners, rather than trying to keep users locked into one catalogue or portal.

• Make partnering with capable technology providers, aggregators and AI tool builders a deliberate strategic choice, with simple and scalable governance and revenue‑sharing models, instead of attempting to build and control all digital solutions in‑house.

7. Build stronger, more strategic partnerships with aggregators

• Stop treating long‑standing aggregators and commercial distributors as a necessary evil. After years of collaboration, they are often the best‑placed partners to reach users and innovate at scale, with capabilities that standards bodies will never fully replicate (technology development, UX, sales, integration, geographic coverage).

• Re‑assess existing relationships with aggregators and commercial distributors and reframe them as genuine strategic alliances, built on mutual trust, shared objectives and long‑term commitments rather than on defensive contractual controls.

• Develop partnership frameworks that: (a) share risks and rewards transparently, including incentives to grow adoption and usage, (b) allow joint design and development of new services and integration solutions, and (c) include clear safeguards on data, branding, quality and the ownership and stewardship of user relationships.

• Move beyond purely transactional, restrictive licensing towards co‑designed offerings in which partners contribute technology, integration into workflows and market access, while standards bodies contribute content, governance, legitimacy and convening power.

8. Federate investments and core infrastructures

• Identify digital infrastructures and tools that are clearly non‑differentiating (for example, XML/authoring pipelines, metadata and identifier schemas, core APIs for access and search, semantic and reference registries) and stop rebuilding them separately in every organization. For these components, explore centralising resources in shared, mutually owned structures (for example, a separate global utility or joint ventures) that serve multiple standards bodies on common terms.

• Pool investments in these shared components through joint ventures, alliances or common projects, so that scarce resources can be focused on genuinely differentiated services and user‑facing innovation rather than on repeatedly rebuilding the same plumbing.

• Wherever feasible, converge on common technical baselines and interfaces, so that partners and users face fewer incompatible implementations and the overall market for standards‑based tools and services can grow on top of a more coherent infrastructure.

9. Handle current “digital transformation” projects strategically

• Reposition ongoing initiatives such as SMART Standards, new authoring environments or semantic pilots as instruments serving the broader business and funding strategy, not as the strategy itself.

• For each major project, explicitly define: (a) which user segments it serves, (b) which concrete problem it solves in their workflows, and (c) how it contributes to a clear funding logic (cost savings, new or improved services, regulatory support), rather than invoking generic “modernisation”.

• Stop treating “SMART” or fully machine‑interpretable formats as the inevitable end‑state for all standards, on the model of autonomous driving levels. As we saw, from a usage point of view this makes very little sense. For many documents, such depth of structuring will never be justified by how they are actually used.

• Equally, stop treating PDFs as a second‑class format to be tolerated while waiting for a “smart” future. For most users, well‑produced, stable, readable PDFs will remain the primary way of working with standards for a long time.

• Narrow ambitions to a small number of high‑value use cases where full SMART treatment demonstrably unlocks value (for example, in regulation, conformity assessment, safety‑critical domains or software integration), and keep the rest of the catalogue at a more modest, affordable “digital‑ready” level, including better, more usable PDFs.

• Pair every technical workstream with an economic one. Do not move from pilot to rollout without a well established, credible, plan for long‑term funding, maintenance and governance, and without explicit criteria for scaling, redesigning or stopping the initiative if the expected value does not materialise.

10. Refocus “digital transformation” on funded use cases

• Require that every major digital initiative start from: (a) a clearly defined user segment and problem, (b) specific expected outcomes, and (c) a credible funding and sustainability model if it succeeds. Choices of formats, tools and architectures should follow from these decisions, not precede them.

• Explicitly distinguish, in planning and reporting, between basic digitalisation (internal efficiency, tooling and workflow improvements) and genuine transformation (new offers, new customers, new funding patterns), and report on them separately to boards and members.

• Strictly limit the number of simultaneous “flagship” digital projects to a portfolio that can realistically be funded, governed and evaluated, with clear prioritisation and regular go/no‑go decision points rather than open‑ended programmes.

11. Align governance and incentives with strategic risk

• Establish simple rules that link approval of new initiatives to decisions on existing ones (for example, “no major new initiative without a corresponding consolidation, redesign or closure of at least one existing activity”), so that portfolios are actively managed rather than allowed to accumulate.

• Recognise and reward behaviours that manage strategic risk: stopping or scaling back projects that do not work, simplifying product and service portfolios, and redirecting resources towards initiatives that support the agreed mandate, funding model and user priorities.

Taken together, these recommendations call for a concrete shift by standards bodies: stop using “digital transformation” as a label for any IT upgrade and instead start from hard choices about the organization’s mandate, funding and users. They also call for treating economics, openness, partnerships and coopetition as explicit design variables in the business model, fundamentally revisiting the current approach, and for using technology only as a means to implement those choices, not as a way to avoid them.

Europe is reforming how it sells standards while the rest of the world is competing to own them. This contrast finds its most visible expression in a single phrase from a post published this week on LinkedIn by CEN and CENELEC1:

Standards to “remain the trusted, invisible engine of the Single Market”. This is a striking image, and a deeply revealing one. As the United States is leveraging bilateral trade deals to redraw the rules of international standardization, and as China consistently executes its strategy to lead the technical bodies that define the technologies of tomorrow, Europe’s response is not to change, to transition from documents to digital services, and to embrace invisibility as a guiding aspiration.

Is this a vision? Or is it a concession dressed in the language of transformation?

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The world order as we know it since the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is now behind us. The period of “Happy Globalization”, as economists and think tanks now like to describe it, going roughly from the early 1980s to around 2010, was based on three main pillars:

• A belief in the liberalization of trade and investments.

• The delegation of technical rule‑making to private and semi‑private standards and regulatory bodies.

• The use of international standards as the primary technical infrastructure for integrating markets and reducing regulatory friction.

During that period, voluntary, consensus-based standardization created immense public value. Today the world is fragmented and the standardization ecosystem is under growing structural pressure driven by geopolitical forces. In this article, I will explore the profound changes that are reshaping standardization, develop potential future scenarios, and present strategies that standards bodies can adopt to survive and remain influential.

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Dear Readers,

Back to The Unstandardized after a few weeks of travels. I am now in Mexico City for the next four months and will be attending Accuris SPAB meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the end of February, where I will speak about standards and geopolitics. In the meantime, here is a new selection of news, …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About standards users

IFAN, the International Federation of Standards Users, has published in October its standards users survey. This …

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently:

About international organizations’ funding

International organizations in Geneva are facing major challenges due to substantial decreas…

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently while I am writing my next essay for The Unstandardized:

From standards organizations

• IEC Annual Report 2024

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

About standards bodies’ business models

A number of US Standards Development Organizations (SDO) have formally opposed the Pro Codes Act

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Dear Readers,

You will find below a selection of news, articles, videos or events that came to my attention recently.

Events to come

• IFAN Webinar - Navigating the AI Landscape: Impacts and opportunities for standards users

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Last week U.S. court ruling in a case involving the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, affirming that the use of books to train its AI model Claude is fair use and transformative1, is not a good news for standards bodies. The decision comes at the moment where these bodies are developing policies so that they can keep the exclusive use of the content in their standards to train, in the future, their own AI models. The verdict directly undermines such plans as any AI generative system can now ingest and repurpose technical content without licensing or compensation, as long as the material has been legally acquired.

The Anthropic ruling compounds the impact of the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) decision on 5 March 2024 requiring free public access to harmonized standards referenced in EU law, with the argument that public interest outweighs the protection of commercial interests of standards bodies. While it is hoped that the mandate for free access to standards in Europe can be contained to the continent and is not going to produce a domino effect, another front is now opening in the United States that is compromising the objectives of standards bodies to add value to the content in standards, and develop new revenues streams through technology.

This combination accelerates the existential threat to the revenues that standards bodies directly derive from the sales of standards. Let’s see why a fundamental shift of mindset, from the defensive copyright policies followed so far to an open exploitation of the content in standards, is not just advisable but critical for the survival of several standards bodies, and how such a shift can be provoked.

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At the recent G7 Summit in Canada, a landmark moment unfolded as the United Kingdom and the United States formally signed the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD)1 first announced in May. While media coverage focused on the incident involving the physical handling of the agreement, the true significance of the EPD has largely escaped notice, particularly within the standardization community. Which is unfortunate as the EPD contains provisions2 that can fundamentally reshape the global standardization landscape and redefine the roles of established multilateral, voluntary standards development organizations. Let’s examine the key elements of the deal and discuss the possible far-reaching implications for international standardization.

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I am Nicolas Fleury, 58 years old, Swiss living in Geneva. I worked for about 35 years at ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, the world’s largest developer and publisher of international standards. …

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