Standardization in Austria is seeing growing involvement: in 2025, around 5000 experts from 3000 organizations were working on standards within national, European, and international bodies. More than 400 of these 5000 were new participants. For a country the size of Austria, this broad and growing participation is a strong sign that standardization is firmly anchored across the economy.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a particularly important role in this context. Around 95 percent of all European companies are SMEs. In Austria, according to EU criteria, as many as 99 percent of companies fall into this category. Their presence in standardization is strong and continues to grow: 44.47 percent of all organizations that appoint experts to the committees and working groups of Austrian Standards are SMEs, and within the ‘Business’ stakeholder group, their share reaches 65 percent.
This upward trend underscores the importance of standards for small and medium-sized enterprises. To support this, Austrian Standards has developed specific initiatives in recent years designed to facilitate SMEs’ access to standards and their participation in standardization. And the latest figures show that these measures are successful.
