Often, commercialization fails not because of the technology’s fundamentals, but because ecosystem economics have not been addressed or critical ecosystem players have not come onboard. The economic and business model requirements for deployment, as well as a technology’s societal license-to-operate, can and should shape the technical problem definition and development of solutions at all stages of the RDD&D continuum. To describe adoption risks, OTT has developed the Adoption Readiness Level (ARL) framework to complement TRL, in partnership with other DOE and industry stakeholders. The framework assesses the adoption risks of a technology and translates this risk assessment into a readiness score, representing the readiness of a technology to be adopted by the ecosystem.
ARL represents important factors for private sector uptake beyond technology readiness,1 and can be determined by performing a qualitative, but fact-based, risk assessment across 17 dimensions of adoption risk spanning four core risk areas.
These 17 dimensions are outlined below, and the Commercial Adoption Readiness Assessment Tool (CARAT) that integrates these dimensions into an assessment of ARL can be downloaded here.
- Value proposition:
- Cost
- Performance
- Ease of use
- Market acceptance:
- Market openness / barriers to entry
- Market size
- Value chain needs realigning?
- Resource maturity:
- Capital lined up all the way to full deployment?
- Can leverage existing capabilities for project development and management?
- Dependent on large-scale infrastructure buildouts?
- Requires the buildout of a new supply chain?
- Relies on critical materials?
- Workforce non-existent?
- License to operate:
- Requires new regulation?
- Dependent on policy interventions?
- Permitting and siting is long and difficult?
- Environmental risk?
- Community acceptance