Organisation Readiness Levels: Managing Organisational Risk in the Technology Development Process

摘要

Technological innovation is an important determinant of sustained company performance and is accepted by most engineering firms as one of the most important tasks in business. Turning a bright idea or immature technology into a competitive product is a challenging task; risks and uncertainties conspire at all stages of development to prevent successful exploitation of the technology. Within many engineering firms there is often a tendency to focus attention on aspects of technical risk and as a result, approaches such as Technology Readiness Levels have gained popularity. The assimilation of Technology Readiness Levels as an engineering approach is testament to their usefulness. However, technology maturity alone should not dominate the engineer's perspective. The maturity of the firm itself requires consideration in order to establish a more comprehensive perspective on risk. In this paper Organisation Readiness Levels are introduced as a framework to assist engineers in identifying the capabilities that a firm needs during the technology development process. The Organisation Readiness Level framework provides a systematic and consistent measure of the organisational maturity of a firm required to develop a technology to the necessary level of technical maturity. The framework aims to achieve this by establishing a relationship between Technology Readiness Levels and the Capability Perspective of the firm. Semi-structured interviews with senior engineers across a range of industries identified the need to provide such a structured approach to manage the organisational risk in technology development. The framework has been applied to a number of technology development programmes working in partnership with a major UK engineering consultancy. Assessment of these case studies identified the need for engineering firms to plan in advance the organisational capabilities required throughout the technology development process. This paper provides a novel perspective on risk management for technical innovators. The concept of organisational capability as a key influence on the success of technology development is presented and a framework to assess organisational maturity is proposed.