Measuring and Assessing Application-Specific Technology Readiness

Technology readiness is a crucial issue for decision-makers in technology-driven enterprises, determining whether the technology will or won’t be adopted for use in products or as a process technology. We know that, in some cases, lower technology readiness will be accepted by the users; these could be end-users, but, more often, it will be used in companies. The impact of a too early or too late adopted technology can be huge for companies and can even threaten market position or the existence of the company itself. Research institutes and technology developers, in particular application-oriented research organizations, might be also interested in which parameters or technology attributes should be improved or extended, according to the addressed application field, so that the technology fulfils the market-requested functions and a fast diffusion in the market can be achieved. Existing technology readiness models cover the various usages of the technology. In many cases, they assess the technology’s use in across different industries and application fields. However, the requirements in many fields are mostly different and very specific; thus, evaluation at such a high level can’t conclude whether the technology should be considered and adopted in the applications involved. 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 requested functions, as well as dynamically mapping the individual technology performance criteria. The applicability of this model will be demonstrated and discussed by a use case in the area of OLED-technology.