Standards have become an important means to promote international trade, foster scientific and technological innovation and achieve sustainable development. But how to accurately evaluate the benefit of standards is a difficult problem. To accurately evaluate and quantify the economic benefits of standards, in 2010, International Standardization Organization (ISO) published a methodology for evaluating the economic benefits of standards, which promote case studies and analyze the economic contribution of standards. In 2020, ISO published the ISO Strategy 2030 and encouraged all countries continue to conduct the studies of the benefits evaluation of standards to demonstrate “the social and economic benefits of standards”.
Under the guidance of Standardization Administration of China (SAC) and Shenzhen Administration for Market Regulation, we translated and published Economic benefits of Standards - International case studies and Economic benefits of standards - ISO methodology 2.0 in 2011, and carried out the first pilot project to evaluate the non–economic benefits of standards. To further participate in the work concerning the benefits evaluation of standards, SAC decided to carry out a pilot study on the benefits of digital economy standards in Shenzhen. Through the systematic study and analysis of representative and typical enterprises and institutions in this industry, two benefit evaluation cases were selected for research, "the application of health code" and "pharmacy intelligent epidemic prevention system". Two evaluation reports, Benefit Evaluation of Standards for Health Code Application in Shenzhen and Standard Benefit Evaluation of the Application of AI-based Pandemic Prevention system in Shenzhen’s Pharmacies, are developed through this pilot project.
These two studies carried out benefits evaluation of inter-organizational digital economy standards for the first time. Based on the close relationship between upstream and downstream links of the digital economy industrial chain or the cross organizational flow characteristics of data in the social governance application scenario, we proposed a new method on building the value chain based on business links to carry out standard benefits analysis and evaluation. The Chinese version were officially released at the "The Celebration of World Standards Day 2021 and the forum on sustainable development standards" in Shenzhen on October 15, 2021, and the English version of these two reports are now officially released. It aims to contribute the China's experience and best practice the benefits evaluation of standards in the field of digital economy, and implements the strategic goal of " demonstrate the benefits of standards" in ISO strategy 2030. Benefits evaluation of standards is a foundation work of standardization, which is of great significance. The evaluation methods summarized through these cases provide method guidance and practical reference for further work.