The Inclusion of White Rabbit into the Global Industry Standard IEEE 1588

White Rabbit (WR) is the first CERN-born technology that has been incorporated into a global industry standard governed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). This showcase of technology transfer has been beneficial to both the standard and to WR technology. For the standard, it has allowed the PTP synchronisation performance to be increased by several orders of magnitude, opening new markets and opportunities for PTP implementers. While for WR technology, the review during its standardisation and its adoption by industry makes it future-proof and drives down prices of the WR hardware that is widely used in scientific installations. This article provides an insight into the 7-year-long WR standardisation process, describing its motivation, benefits, costs and the final result. After a short introduction to WR, it describes the process of reviewing, generalising and translating it into an IEEE standard. Finally, it retrospectively evaluates this process in terms of efforts and benefits to conclude that basing new technologies on standards and extending them bears short-term costs that bring long-term benefits.