Development of technology maturity framework in managing manufacturing improvement for innovation providers

Readiness measurement frameworks have been used in different sectors of industry for many years. Many companies described them as essential when considering product development processes. Unfortunately, most of these frameworks cannot be directly applied in research centre environment for two reasons: too complicated, and not relevant to research centres‟ nature of work (Gove and Uzdzinski, 2013; Lind et al., 2013; Mankinsab, 2009). In addition, innovation providers have to consider global megatrends and the way they influence the community especially the manufacturing sector. For example, an increasing demand for customised nano- and macro- technologies has been observed and this trend has created a great impact on technological innovations and directions that research projects will follow in the coming years. This study focuses on manufacturing sector as this sector is mostly affected by the megatrends (Hajkowicz, 2015; Korn Ferry Hay Group, 2016; Ernest & Young, 2015). As existing industrial frameworks are not applicable at research centres, there is a need for developing new framework that would help not only with monitoring technology development processes, but also with decision-making processes. In fact, the majority of research centres in the UK often use road-mapping to evaluate and decide what would be their next actions. However, road-mapping was sometimes described as unreliable and hard to validate (Kostoff & Schaller, 2001). Anew framework would therefore be a better alternative. Preliminary studies suggested that there is a need for a new research centre-oriented framework, hence called technology maturity (Dombrowski et al., 2016; Gove & Uzdzinski, 2013). Moreover, given the importance of megatrends to the manufacturing sector, technology maturity, is found crucial when developing new technological solutions and considering so-called "valley of death", i.e. the transition from the innovation stage to the competitive manufacturing stage. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to develop a conceptual maturity framework and support research centres to enter Industry 4.0 by overcoming some of the modern engineering issues such as "valley of death".