Standards as enablers for innovation in education - the breakdown of European pre-standardisation

Content industries go through a demanding time adjusting to the digital age, revamping their business processes when sales of paper documents are not an option any more. Formal standardisation is facing the same challenges as organisations like ISO and CEN see sales of publications as their core business. This paper presents a case study from European pre-standardisation. CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies was in 2013 put on hold due to the threat the European standardisation body CEN sees to its business model. The conflict is centred on open work processes, and open and freely available documents. Standardisation experts in education claim that stakeholder engagement, input from research, and willingness to implement the developed standards will be harmed by following CEN´s strict interpretation of their rules. Open Research, Open innovation, Open Data and a series of other open policies are now values that make up the foundation for driving the Innovation cycle underlying standardisation activities. Barriers to openness could hamper participation from research and restrict implementations and user engagement.