Are Europeans More Collaborative?

October 6th, 2005

Last week, I met with the marketing folks of a large CAD software company. In the course of our discussion, they mentioned that their new software is going to support OSEK and Autosar. OSEK bills itself as “an industry standard for an open-ended architecture for distributed control units in vehicles.” Autosar is a partnership that is aiming to establish “an open standard for automotive E/E architecture. It will serve as a basic infrastructure for the management of functions within both future applications and standard software modules.”

What struck me at that point is that most of this work is being driven by European companies. The OSEK steering committee, for example, consists of Adam Opel AG, BMW AG, DaimlerChrysler AG, University of Karlsruhe - IIIT, PSA, Renault SA, Robert Bosch GmbH, Siemens AG, and Volkswagen AG–not a single American company among them. Ford and GM (via its subsidiary Opel) are “core” members of Autosar, but the bulk of the members are European.

Another example of Europeans driving standardization is ASAM–the Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems. This group got its start in Europe, and currently has its headquarters near Munich. Many American companies are now members of this consortium, but its outlook is distinctly European.

This begs the question: Are Europeans more collaborative than the Americans or Japanese? Another question comes to mind, too–Is there real value in these standardization efforts?

My take is that there is real value here–especially with regard to the ASAM standards. For the others, time will tell.

Entry Filed under: Standards