IT Standards are often viewed as a means to facilitate interoperability at a technical level. They have, however, a range of functions and characteristics beyond a purely technical scope which can impact the business and economic environments in which they are deployed.
The higher levels of technological convergence envisaged within Ambient Intelligence environments require the use of standards to enable interoperability; however there are a variety of reasons why organisations choose to follow more closed or proprietary approaches when adopting such standards.
Consequently, this research seeks to explore how open and closed interoperability standards adoption is viewed by key stakeholders, and to investigate the factors that impact the standards adoption decision. The primary outcome of the research will be a model of standards adoption which is tailored specifically to the context of Ambient Intelligence oriented technologies.
In doing so, the research seeks to extend current models of Innovation Adoption which fail to adequately explain the adoption of certain classes of new technologies. It has been argued that this is true where technologies are Complex, and/or are Network-Based. In the case of technologies to support Ambient Intelligence, Complex Network-Based Information Systems (CNIS) are required to enable development. For this reason, traditional Innovation Adoption theory requires extension within this technological context.