Technology readiness: the gap from prototype to deployment

What a field trial proves, exactly

It proves that the system worked on that ground, in those conditions, on those days, with the people who designed it present and able to intervene. That is a real and difficult achievement, and it is a narrower claim than the coverage of such events usually implies.

Each qualifier in that sentence is doing work. That ground: terrain determines coverage, so a trial on rolling grassland says little about forest or upland. Those conditions: a March trial says nothing about full canopy in July, and a clear night says nothing about fog. Those days: nothing about the third month of unattended operation. With the builders present: nothing about what happens when a subsystem fails at three in the morning and the nearest person who understands it is in another country.

Who pays for the rest, and why nobody does

A framework programme funds design, build and demonstration, and then closes. Procurement is a separate process, on separate money, decided by national authorities to national timetables and national rules. There is no mechanism that carries a successful demonstration across that gap automatically, and there is no reason to expect one: the two activities have different purposes, different accountability and different law.

The consequence is a structural gap rather than a failure of will. The consortium that built the prototype is usually dissolved when the grant ends. The member state that might buy something is working from its own requirements, its own budget cycle and its own installed base, and often was represented on the project only through an advisory board with no commissioning power. Between the two sits the level 7-to-9 work that neither is funded to do.

None of this makes the research wasted. Subsystems, methods and expertise migrate into later programmes and into products that are not recognisably descended from the original. What does not survive is the integrated system, which is precisely the thing the programme was named after and the thing coverage reports on.

Reading a demonstration without over-reading it

• Ask what ground, what season and what weather — a demonstration is a claim about conditions
• Ask who was present: builders on site is a different system from unattended operation
• Ask what the readiness level was and against what environment it was assessed
• Do not read the absence of a follow-on as either success or failure; it is the normal terminus

Applied to the four programmes profiled here, that reading produces the same result each time: difficult work, genuinely demonstrated, at a readiness level short of deployment, ending where the instrument that funded it was designed to end.

What does cross the gap

Something always survives, and it is rarely the thing the programme was named after. Methods cross: a way of correlating two sensor channels, a test protocol, a calibration approach. Components cross, usually into a supplier's ordinary product line, where they are no longer identifiable as programme output. And people cross, which is the most reliable transfer of the three — the engineers who built the prototype carry what they learned into the next consortium and into industry, and that transfer leaves no document at all.

There is also a second-buyer problem in the move from prototype to deployment that rarely appears in coverage, and technology readiness does not measure it. Even a system that completed the readiness work would face a border authority with an installed base: existing masts, existing radios, an existing command system and an existing supplier relationship, all of which the new capability has to fit. A technically superior system that requires replacing the surrounding infrastructure competes against an inferior one that does not, and loses more often than not. That is not a failure of the research; it is a fact about buying anything into a working operation.