Context

Standards help achieve both private and public good outcomes, including supporting the Government’s economic growth objectives. While the New Zealand standards system faces several intersecting pressures, the global standards system is undergoing significant disruption, driven by rapid advancements in digital technologies.

The value of standards

Standards are agreed specifications for products, processes, services, systems, and performance. Standards sit behind almost everything from our built environment to the products and services we buy and consume. They support New Zealand to grow, enable government priorities and reform initiatives, protect consumers, ensure quality and support regulatory compliance. They guide consistency, set performance and quality expectations, and define the right way to do things. They can support innovation, competition, market access and trade opportunities by defining the level of performance, safety, quality and reliability for new and alternative products and services. They are a valued component of a range of sectors and have underpinned New Zealand’s regulatory systems for more than nine decades.

Operating environment

The New Zealand standards system must balance strong stewardship and technical integrity with greater agility, crosssector collaboration and responsiveness to emerging risks and sector needs, while maintaining confidence among industry, government and the public. It is characterised by several intersecting pressures.

• Growing demand and pace of change: Standards are needed more quickly to keep pace with emerging technologies (e.g. AI, digital systems), sustainability transitions, and evolving market practices. There is pressure to modernise how standards are developed, accessed, and used, including use of AI, digital platforms, collaborative authoring tools, data standards, and more user-friendly formats.
• International alignment and influence: There is increasing value in aligning with international standards to support trade, market access, foreign investment, interoperability of products, services and workforces, and global competitiveness, while also ensuring local relevance.
• Trust, credibility and inclusion: As issues cut across sectors (e.g. climate, infrastructure, digital trust, health), standards development increasingly requires coordination across multiple stakeholder groups. The system must maintain technical rigour and independence, while ensuring broad participation, including government regulators, industry, academia, international bodies, iwi, consumers and under-represented stakeholders.
• Capacity and affordability constraints: The New Zealand market is small, and business professionals are time poor and financially constrained. Limited technical capacity and affordability constraints among both private and public sectors (including Standards NZ) limit New Zealand’s ability to fully leverage the joint Australian–New Zealand standards development partnership and limit participation and influence in international standards development and adoption.
• Compliance focused and reactive: In New Zealand, standards are predominantly viewed as a regulatory compliance tool and are utilised by a relatively small number of government agencies and sectors. Not using them strategically as an economic enabler to drive innovation, business productivity, competition and quality is seen as a missed opportunity for a small, export-dependent economy that relies on access to global markets, international supply chains and foreign investment.
• Ability to generate sufficient third-party funding: Costs are a barrier to standards development and adoption as well as maintenance and access to existing standards. This limits their uptake and use across industry. The system relies on third parties being willing and able to invest in standards development and access.

Global trends and the future standards landscape

The rapid advances in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, are accelerating a shift away from the traditional ‘publishing model’ where standards are sold as static documents, towards a ‘knowledge model’, where standards content is delivered as dynamic, accessible and integrated information. Globally, users increasingly expect standards to be available in faster, more accessible, more affordable and digitally enabled formats, including through AI tools. Traditional approaches where users read standards from cover to cover are becoming less relevant. Instead, time-constrained users are seeking targeted answers to specific questions, with those answers drawn directly from the underlying standards content.

In response, standards bodies are being required to adapt their:

• Service delivery models, moving towards digital and on-demand access
• Commercial frameworks, shifting from product-based sales to service-oriented offerings
• Value propositions, focusing on the usability and integration of standards content.

Both international and national standards organisations are facing increasing pressure to protect, value and commercialise their intellectual property while simultaneously meeting market expectations for content that is:

• Fast to access
• Digitally integrated
• Interoperable across systems
• Easy to use and understand

This transition is comparable to disruptions historically seen in other industries, for example, the evolution from physical video rental to online streaming, or from cheque books and bank tellers to mobile and digital banking apps. In each case, digital innovation has driven fundamental changes in business models, customer expectations and service delivery. A similar transformation is now underway in standardisation.

There is also a growing international policy trend towards free public access to standards, particularly where they are incorporated into regulatory frameworks. This reflects the principle that individuals and businesses should be able to read and understand rules they are required to comply with. Removing the cost barrier reduces obstacles to compliance, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises, improves safety outcomes, supports business productivity and participation and ensures equitable access to the technical rules that underpin legislation.

These global and domestic developments point to a transition in the standards ecosystem, characterised by:

• Increased digitisation and use of AI-enabled delivery models
• Evolving commercial models for standards organisations
• Strengthened expectations for free access to standards that have regulatory effect

Taken together, these trends will shape the future role of standards as both economic infrastructure and regulatory instruments, with implications for how they are developed, accessed, funded and governed.