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Standards game

A strategy focused on making your technology, process, or specification the dominant benchmark in a market, thereby disadvantaging competitors who use alternatives.

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"Driving a market to a standard to create a cost of transition for others or remove the ability of others to differentiate."

-- Simon Wardley

Goal: To make your way of doing something the only viable way, or at least the dominant one.

Effects:

  • Reduces Competitor Differentiation: If everyone has to use your standard, competitors can't easily offer unique value propositions based on alternative approaches. Their offerings become more commodity-like relative to the standard.
  • Creates Transition/Switching Costs: Once customers or the market adopt a standard, moving away from it becomes costly and difficult, locking them in and discouraging competitors.

Mechanisms:

  • Open sourcing (to drive adoption)
  • Lobbying regulators (to mandate it)
  • Partnerships / ecosystems (to embed it).
  • Market dominance (to create a de facto standard).
  • Forming/influencing industry consoryia.
note

The Standards Game is a specific strategic play often aimed at achieving Limitation of Competition by controlling the market's underlying benchmark. It directly contributes to Raising Barriers to Entry by establishing high switching costs and forcing compliance. Winning the Standards Game can be achieved through market actions (like open sourcing or partnerships) or by using Lobbying to get the standard enshrined in policy, effectively turning it into a form of Defensive Regulation.

Forcing a market to adopt your standard eliminates competitors’ differentiation and creates high switching costs. This can be achieved by open sourcing your component (removing profit but gaining strategic control), lobbying regulators, or partnering to embed your standard widely.

Once the standard is entrenched, you control the direction, timeline, and ecosystem. Everyone else becomes a commodity provider or adopter. You’re the constraint they must work around.

Strategically, this is brutal but effective: turn their innovation into your baseline.

  • Open Approaches (Accelerators): The most effective vector to drive adoption of your standard.
  • Defensive regulation (Defensive): Can codify your standard into law or industry best practice.
  • Lobbying (User Perception): A powerful lever to institutionalise standards.
  • Design to fail (Poison): Standardisation can be a pre-emptive strike—make others invest in dead-end proprietary systems.
  • Limitation of competition (Deaccelerators): Standards often act as hidden walls.