Technology readiness revisited: A proposal for extending the scope of impact assessment of European public services

Abstract

The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale has been widely adopted at EU, national and regional levels in the current (2014-2020) programming period as a tool for decision making when financing Research, Development and Innovation investments with public grants. We propose the extension and generalisation of this scale in three further directions, namely the Legal, Organisational and Societal Readiness Levels. With the only, partial, exception of the Legal, the three proposed scales closely track the expected progress of Technology Readiness and, in a normative perspective, should be enhanced and supported in any technology take-up pilot aiming to be successful. The resulting, 4-Axis framework has been used to assess the potential of new and existing digital technologies to promote innovation in European public services while ensuring cross-border and cross-domain interoperability. We propose the adoption of this framework as a public sector innovation policy tool to evaluate the performance of EU funded Research, Development and Innovation projects in the next programming period 2021-2027.