From NASA to EU: the evolution of the TRL scale in Public Sector Innovation
2017; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1715-3816
Autores Tópico(s)Space exploration and regulation
ResumoIntroductionThis article explains how the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale became, through various mutations, an official innovation policy tool of the European Union (EU). TRL originated at the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where it began as a means of measuring how far a technology was from being deployed in space. Later, since 1999, as an outcome of a US Government investigation, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was required to use TRL in weapons technology acquisition (Schinasi, et al., 1999). Similarly, the Commonwealth of Australia conducted the Kinnaird Defense Procurement Review (Kinnaird, et al., 2003) and started using TRL in its own DoD. Around that time, the usage of TRL spread among other governmental and military organizations in English-speaking countries and was also adopted by the European Space Agency. A glossary of terms is provided in Appendix I.From the very beginning, TRL was used to define boundaries between different organizational and financial modes of technological development. Perhaps this is why it made sense to the High-Level Expert Group on Key Enabling Technologies (HLG-KET) of the European Union to build TRL into the foundation of its new public innovation policy. The universal usage of TRL in EU policy was proposed in the final report of the first HLG-KET (HLG-KET, 2011), and it was indeed implemented in the subsequent EU framework program, called H2020, running from 2013 to 2020. This means not only space and weapons programs, but everything from nanotechnology to informatics and communication technology.Central ArgumentThis article argues that it has never been established whether the originally space and weapons technology-specific TRL scale can be used fruitfully in all areas of innovation. Because of this, the EU-wide mandate to use TRL across all publicly funded programs is a risky innovation of the innovation policy itself. This article argues that the subtle mutations happened to the TRL concept in the last three decades. Many aspects of the TRL scale were lost, forgotten or abstracted away during its journey to the EU, while in the meantime; new meanings and associations were formed. In the absence of discipline-specific guides, TRLs will predictably become a source of confusion and a subject of abuse in efforts to obtain EU funding.Article Organization and MethodologyThe article first covers the evolution of TRL from its beginning at NASA to 2013 when it became both an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard and a de facto standard within space and weapons industry. The aim of this first section is to see through the often one-sided laudation of TRL and find the actual, rather hidden factors and conditions that made it widely accepted. The method of this part is the historical analysis of policy documents, program descriptions and other sources.The hidden factors uncovered in the first section facilitate the evaluation of the TRL usage in EU public sector innovation context. This section covers the developments from the first HLG-KET report (HLG-KET, 2011), presents how the H2020 program attempts to implement the TRL scale and ends in 2015 when the final report of the second EU HLG-KET report was written (HLG-KET, 2015). The focus of this description is on the mutations of the practices of using TRL for decision making.These first two sections provide the necessary background to the discussion of the opportunities and risks of TRL bring to the EU in the third section.LimitationsThis article is based on publicly available sources only. There might have been various reasons behind the adoption of the TRL scale in the EU in addition to those revealed in these public documents. Therefore, some issues presented herein may have been caused by the simple lack of communication and not necessarily a lack of clear strategy making. Then again, the majority of those who will have to adopt the TRL scale in order to participate in EU programs have no choice but to rely on public documents. …
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