Customized Technology Readiness: Introducing the application specific technology readiness model

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 like NASA´s Technology Readiness Levels or other technology lifecycle models (like Gartner´s Hype-Cycle, etc.) are in use. These models lack of applicability within the above mentioned tasks, as the technology readiness is analyzed and visualized for a whole industry or branch. However, enterprises need an estimation of technology readiness based on the very specific requirement profile of their application. For example: a 3-year lifecycle display technology corresponds to the lifecycle of a mobile phone (in this case the technology is mature), whereas for a 15-year lifecycle of a car, the same technology is very immature (concerning the lifecycle). This paper introduces an approach on how to determine and map the application-specific readiness of technology by decomposing both, the application and the technology into its provided resp. requested functions and performance-resp. requirements´-profile as well as the dynamical mapping of the single technology performance criteria. Furthermore, this paper gives an outlook on how this model could be used to predict the future development of technology. Within a use case in the area of OLED-technology the application-specific technology readiness-model will be demonstrated and discussed.