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Avoiding the Valleys of Death
A “System Readiness Level” metric could provide a baseline for lean product development.
At Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Wright brothers made the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight in history. Yet their preoccupation soon afterward with patent protection, rather than innovation, may have doomed their enterprise. [Library of Congress]
Many are familiar with Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs)—a concept, first developed by NASA in the 1970s, that’s used to benchmark a technology’s development progress on a scale of 1 to 9. And many have also heard of the “valley of death” at TRLs 4 to 6, when a technology must bridge the gap between demonstration of a lab prototype and the road to actual commercialization.
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