Generally speaking, projects pursuing standardization of their results should take a global focus. This will maximize exposure to the industry, and consequently widen dissemination opportunities. In addition it will help to prevent competing regional standards from emerging, which may cause barriers to trade. Nevertheless, there may also be specific reasons to pursue standardization at a regional or national level, for example because a consortium partners is well embedded in a particular national or regional standards environment, because projects may want to take specific national or regional issues into account, because less resources are required for national or regional standardization processes, or because projects focus on a specific regional market environment.
Regional and global standardization systems can be complementary and several standards bodies have arrangements in place for addressing this. Nevertheless cooperation and exchange between globally and regionally oriented standards organizations is mostly organized on an ad-hoc basis. Consequently projects should determine whether the organization they intend to interface with actually matches the geographic scope they have defined, prior to starting their standardization activities.