Prof. Alison Olechowski (MIT / U Toronto) is visiting us. She is an all-around fabulous person and will give a seminar on her TRL-related research. I am providing the abstract below.

Please register by emailing jooehm@dtu.dk, so I can add you to the Outlook meeting invite (and you will receive an update in case the room changes etc.)

Read more about Alison here: https://www.mie.utoronto.ca/mie/faculty/olechowski

Technology Readiness Levels – Uses, Challenges, Solutions

Presentation followed by discussion

Many of today's highly innovative products and systems are built around new technologies. These technologies can enable operation in extreme environments, and can lead to the introduction of radically new products to open whole new product categories. Given this potential upside of new technologies, a huge amount of engineering resources is spent on R&D and technology development activities to progress the readiness of technological ideas to the point where they are embodied in a component that can be incorporated into a new product or system.

In this talk, Alison will present an investigation, assessment and discussion of the challenges of modern use of the technology readiness level (TRL) method, a tool commonly used during engineering technology development to measure technology maturity. She will present evidence collected via semi-structured interviews with and a survey of TRL practitioners in industry, identifying challenges of implementation. These challenges relate to decision-making, leadership and project management among other things. Challenges related to system complexity were found to be most critical to TRL users. Alison will present new solutions to address a number of these challenges, and discuss directions for future research to tackle more.