Opening Doors to World Markets—The Standards Advantage

2010-03-22

When Greg Stone (VP, Business Development at IRIS Power) first started volunteering on the technical committees that develop international standards, he did so as part of his job as a young engineer at Ontario Hydro. Thirty years later, he continues to contribute to standards development efforts as a way of protecting and building the interests of a company that has become an international success—due in-part to the doors opened to it, by the very standards on which he first worked.

 

 

“It’s very much a strategic move to be involved in the development of standards,” Stone says. “When my colleagues and I started our company, we wanted to make sure the standards were permissive to our kind of technology because then it’s easier for our customers to buy our product, especially European customers and other customers around the world.”

Stone says that since the early 1980s, he has been able to see the value of participation in standards development for companies that purchase and sell products and services in global markets.

At the start of his career with Ontario Hydro, he was required to participate in the work of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)’s technical committees solely as a means of ensuring that the IEC standards for rotating machines included provisions that Ontario Hydro thought were important to achieve long machine life.

Stone believes that the companies and countries that pay for people to attend technical committee meetings have the biggest say on what is included in a standard.

“And companies often say to buyers, ‘This isn’t in an IEC standard, so you can’t ask for this,’” Stone explains. “So if you’re going to a vendor and you want a motor or a generator that has certain characteristics, if it isn’t included in an IEC standard, then basically those manufacturers say, ‘Sorry, you can’t ask for that.’”

But because his company did sponsor employees to volunteer with IEC committees, it could provide input to the standards that set out the specifications of the equipment it was buying. This allowed the company to have more control over what sort of equipment it was using, as well as where, and from whom it was purchasing it.

Having a market advantage was still on Stone’s mind when he and three colleagues from Ontario Hydro started their own company, Iris Power, in 1990. The company provides on-line partial discharge test equipment to evaluate, during normal operation, the condition of high-voltage insulation in large generators and motors, mostly within the North American market.

Iris’ founders took a lesson from their previous employer on how to increase the size of their market. “Because we were just a small company starting out, we could have saved money by not participating. However, there weren’t really any standards available for the particular product that we were making at Iris,” he explains. “So my role was to try and make sure the IEC standards are permissive of our kind of testing, and especially that they don’t forbid it. At that point, my point of view changed: I was a user when I was at Ontario Hydro, and now I’m a vendor. I wanted to make sure that when IEC is making standards for testing in motors or generators that it included our kind of partial discharge test and other testing we want to do.”

He says the investment of time and work on the committees has paid off dramatically for Iris Power. When the company started providing its product, he estimates, about 90 per cent of its business was performed in the Canadian and American markets. Partly as a result of the numerous rotating machine standards produced by IEC that now include reference to partial discharge test methods, the Toronto-based company now does about 60 per cent of its business outside North America, and its monitoring equipment is installed in industrial plants and electric power utility generating stations in more than 30 countries. Iris has grown to about 100 people, who are mainly based at its Toronto headquarters.

Although now an elected member of the IEC Council Board, which is the commission’s governing body, Stone remains active on several IEC rotating machine standards working groups, addressing standards that are even more closely related to his company’s product. He says he can’t stress enough the value that his standards involvement has had for the success of his company.

“If you’re going to try to enter markets outside of North America and you’re in a technical field, especially if you’ve got some sort of new technology, one of your strategies has got to be helping out with standards development,” says Stone.

“The thing about standards is that they can be a barrier to you or your competitors in a certain market,” adds Stone. “If the standards include your technology, you’re opening markets for your product; but if they don’t, those markets are closed to you.”

-30-

Back