Is it ready? Quantifying the maturity of emerging technologies

Abstract

The Department of Defense uses advanced technology to provide U.S. weapons systems superior operational capabilities. Technology Readiness Assessments establish the technological maturity level of emergent technologies. However, these assessments often rely upon subjective evaluations that depend upon measures indirectly associated with the actual readiness of a technology for use in a specific end-use application. The challenge of measuring the readiness of an emerging advanced technology for use in a new system remains subjective and a source of early program cost and schedule risk.

Prior bibliometric-based methods are sensitive to the search logic, keywords, and the specific corpus used. Visualization tools and larger datasets provide insights into the overall body of work and identify new patterns and associations. However, such methods have not been validated against independent assessments of actual maturity.

This paper presents novel methods, strategies, and results of using publicly available publication data to identify when specific technologies were mature enough to be used in programs approaching Milestone B. The method is calibrated using declarations from authoritative sources such as Selected Acquisition Reports and correlated against independent assessments from the Government Accountability Office.