The standards process worked reasonably well from 2G to 4G, evolving over time.
For 2G, the need was clear. First generation phones were much more successful than expected resulting in problems of capacity. There were myriad security issues and the lack of roaming and harmonisation was clearly problematic. 2G was designed to fix these problems and did so extremely well. It delivered excellent profitability for manufacturers and operators and unexpectedly new services such as SMS, which was added to the standard as a way for telecoms engineers to communicate with each other. It was driven heavily by mobile operators who often had large R&D departments and could play an active role.