Customized technology readiness: Introducing the application specific technology readiness model

Abstract

Enterprises - as technology users - implement specific technologies into their applications to fulfill market-requested functions. To meet the exacerbating market needs, one of the primary duties of technology forecasting within enterprises is to identify relevant technologies, to determine their readiness, to predict their future development and thereafter to estimate their suitability within the enterprise application. To measure the readiness of a technology, models likeNASA's Technology Readiness Levels or other technologylifecycle models (like Gartner's Hype-Cycle, etc.) are in use.These models lack of applicability within the above mentionedtasks, as the technology readiness is analyzed and visualizedfor a whole industry or branch. However, enterprises needan estimation of technology readiness based on the very specificrequirement profile of their application.For example: a 3-year lifecycle display technology correspondsto the lifecycle of a mobile phone (in this case the technologyis mature), whereas for a 15-year lifecycle of a car, thesame technology is very immature (concerning the lifecycle).This paper introduces an approach on how to determine andmap the application-specific readiness of technology by decomposingboth, the application and the technology into its providedresp. requested functions and performance- resp. requirementsprofileas well as the dynamical mapping of the single technologyperformance criteria. Furthermore, this paper gives an outlookon how this model could be used to predict the future developmentof technology.Within a use case in the area of OLED-technology the application-specific technology readiness-model will be demonstratedand discussed.© 2012 IEEE.