A new Nordic study, ”The Influence of Standards on the Nordic Economies”, shows that using standards has a positive effect on the companies' and the nordic countries' development. According to the study standardisation can be linked to 28 percent of the GDP growth in the Nordic countries during the last ten decades. In this chronicle Thomas Idermark, CEO of SIS writes about the benefits of working with standards.

Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality, said the 14th Dalai Lama once.

In modern times, we see knowledge sharing happening at ever greater speeds. It can be mesmerising to follow ideas, technologies and cultures colliding together and metamorphose into new traditions and technologies.

However, in this increasingly chaotic world, it can also be relieving to have a few basic rules to go by. At their best, routines help us switch onto autopilot every once in a while, and thus navigate through our daily chores with ease. In doing so, they also leave room for creativity to emerge. Oftentimes, we take these routines for granted – even though they are what make our day run smoothly. Because they are, well, routine, they're often underappreciated.

Take traveling, for example. We all love to travel with ease, and while we may commend the pilot or crew members for an enjoyable flight, we rarely acknowledge the efforts of security officials and other ground staff, whose practices have been synchronised to ensure safe and effortless traveling. Their routines help them share knowledge more efficiently, resulting in a smoother ride for us all.

This same background work of sharing best practices is achieved in business by using standards. Through standardisation, companies, products, services and processes can move effortlessly between markets. Standardisation is a mutual agreement of best practices between different market areas, which customers and companies can trust.

This is supported by a new study, The Influence of Standards on the Nordic Economies, which found that standardisation was associated with a 39% growth in labour productivity in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. What's more, standardisation was associated with a 28% growth in GDP in the participating countries between 1976–2014.

The study explains that standards offer a way for companies to streamline the path to foreign markets, allowing them to increase their sales. Standards are also a good means of improving market access to innovations, and they help companies keep up with and anticipate technological developments. This is interesting to established companies – and especially interesting to startups, who are bringing forth new innovations and challenging their market.

Finally, standards play a key role in securing trust – of all the 1197 companies that participated, 85% reported that standards help create trust and confidence between them and their customers. This is good news in a time when sustainability is a huge trend and, thankfully, even a necessity. Customers are in a demand for continuously better quality, produced ecologically as well as with solid processes. Quality guaranteed by standards.

As the Dalai Lama said, sharing knowledge is a way to achieve immortality. While we can't promise that your ideas will live forever, learning to share knowledge more efficiently is a step towards a better world.