Communicating Progress in Deep Tech - Part 1
How the Frameworks Built by Stan Sadin and Professor John Mankins Gave Deep Tech a Common Language
The following essay is the first of our two-part series on the tools and frameworks Deep Tech companies can use to increase their chance of success along the Lab-to-Market journey.
The Problem Without a Name
Why do so many Lab-to-Market journeys end in failure? Is it really to do with the funding, the people, the science, or the market? Or is it to do with something far more fundamental? To answer this, let us take a trip back in time to the leading Lab-to-Market journey of the 20th century.
Late 1960s. NASA. The height of the Apollo programme, the most advanced science, technology, and engineering initiative in history. And yet, even here, there was no reliable way to answer questions like, ‘how mature is this technology, really?’
Even groups like NASA back then lacked a common vocabulary for distinguishing a phenomenon observed in a laboratory from a system proven in operational conditions. Technical progress and risk were described in ways that were not comparable or calibrated, leading to ever-widening gaps between claims and reality.
By the 1970s, this gap had grown further, leading to diminished trust and budgets from the then US administration. To rectify this – to encourage the US administration to open the purse strings again so that NASA could continue its activity – a new way of communicating progress needed to be developed.
It was into this gap that a then-young NASA scientist, Stan Sadin, introduced what would become one of the most influential ideas in the history of innovation management. In 1974, he conceived a simple, seven-level scale for describing the maturity of a technology – a scale that asked the following: 'what has this technology actually demonstrated, and under what conditions?'
The scale was simple, yet elegant. At its lower levels, it captured the transition from basic scientific observation to articulated concept. At its middle levels, it traced the move from laboratory proof to validated performance in relevant environments. At its upper levels, it described the shift from prototype to proven operational system. Each level was a clear, precise description of where a technology sat.
Mankins and the Nine-Level Standard
The seven-level scale Sadin introduced was powerful, but it left important ground uncovered. During the late 80s, fellow NASA physicist, John C. Mankins, extended the scale to nine levels – a change that reflected the growing complexity of the systems the agency was developing. Then, in 1995, writing from NASA's Advanced Concepts Office, Mankins produced the white paper that came to define the framework as the world would come to know it.
‘Technology Readiness Levels: A White Paper’ (1995), gave each of the nine readiness levels a precise, rigorous definition, along with illustrative examples. TRL 1 captured the observation of basic principles. TRL 9 described a system proven through successful mission operations. Between them, the scale traced the full arc from scientific curiosity to operational reality.
Each level was a distinct milestone. Moving from TRL 4 to TRL 5 was not simply 'more progress'. It represented a different kind of evidence, with qualitatively different implications for what a programme could promise and what it could not.
The paper had a tremendous impact on advanced science, technology, and engineering innovation globally. The US Air Force adopted the framework in the 1990s. In 1999, the US General Accounting Office recommended wider TRL adoption as a risk management discipline. By 2001, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense had endorsed TRLs across major new programmes, and by 2003 the DoD had published its own Technology Readiness Assessment Deskbook.
Outside the United States, the impact was equally significant. The European Space Agency formally adopted the TRL scale in the mid-2000s, publishing its own TRL Handbook for Space Applications in 2008. The European Commission introduced TRLs into its Framework Programme 7 in 2010, and they became a central feature of Horizon 2020. In 2013, the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 16290:2013, formally canonising the nine-level scale as an international standard.
Today, the framework is in active use across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and across European nations, and has been embraced by organisations including NATO, the OECD, and a broad range of national defence and innovation agencies. Within the United States alone, agencies including the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and DARPA have adopted TRL-based assessment methodologies tailored to their specific domains. And of course, the framework is widely used by Deep Tech corporates, startups, spinouts, and scale-ups, as well as their investors.
Beyond TRL: R&D³ and TNV
But Mankins also understood that technical maturity, by itself, tells only part of the story. Two questions that the TRL scale does not fully answer proved to be equally important in practice: how difficult will it be to advance this technology further? And how much does society actually need what this technology promises to deliver?
To address the first question, Mankins developed what he termed the Research and Development Degree of Difficulty – commonly abbreviated as R&D³ – formalised in a NASA white paper in 2000.
The R&D³ scale recognised that two technologies could sit at the same TRL, and yet represent wildly different levels of challenge to advance. A technology at TRL 5 with well-understood physics and an established supply chain is a fundamentally different proposition from a technology at TRL 5 where the underlying science is still contested, the manufacturing pathway is unknown, and no relevant industrial ecosystem yet exists. R&D³ provided a structured way to assess and communicate that difference.
In practice, R&D³ functions as a complement to TRL. It forces decision-makers to confront where a technology is and what it will cost – in time, capital, and organisational capacity – to move it forward. For programme managers, investors, and boards evaluating where to commit resources, this distinction is critical.
To address the second question of value, Mankins developed the concept of Technology Need Value, or TNV. If TRL assesses maturity and R&D³ assesses difficulty, TNV addresses relevance: does the system / portfolio / world need this technology, and how urgently? TNV introduced a structured way of weighing the strategic, economic, and social importance of a technology's potential contribution against the cost and risk of its development.
Used together, TRL, R&D³, and TNV constitute an integrated framework for Technology Readiness and Risk Assessment – one that can support fully rounded judgements about which technologies deserve investment, at what pace, and with what degree of urgency.
Such an integrated view matters especially in Deep Tech, where the temptation to pursue technically fascinating work regardless of market relevance is ever-present, and where the cost of discovering irrelevance late in the development cycle can be existential. Mankins' broader framework – spanning maturity, difficulty, and value – provides language for questions that Deep Tech companies and their backers rarely address.
The Offshoots: MRL, CRL, and Others
As organisations applied TRL across increasingly diverse domains, two limitations became apparent. First, technical readiness and manufacturing readiness are not the same thing – a technology that performs in a laboratory is not necessarily one that can be produced consistently, economically, and at scale. Second, neither technical nor manufacturing readiness says anything about whether customers, regulators, ecosystems, and markets are actually willing and able to absorb what a company is building.
The Manufacturing Readiness Level framework emerged from the US Department of Defense, which defined and formalised the scale. It looks at whether a technology can be produced repeatedly, within cost and yield targets, by people other than its inventors, under conditions that resemble real-world production, not just controlled experimentation.
The DoD's integration of TRL and MRL assessments into its own acquisition process reflected the lesson that cost overruns and programme failures were often traceable to manufacturing immaturity, and not to technical immaturity, forcing them to re-address the assumption that a proven prototype translates naturally into reliable production.
The Commercial Readiness Level framework addressed the third dimension. Developed by Professor Ali Abbas and Dr. Mobin Nomvar at the University of Sydney, and designed to operate in synchronisation with TRL, CRL asks whether the external world – customers, regulators, financiers, and the broader value chain – is prepared to accept and integrate a new technology. For those building businesses, these are critical questions.
Companies in Advanced Materials, for example, discover that qualification processes at conservative industrial customers routinely take years, regardless of technical performance. Climate Hardware companies find that financing institutions, and not end customers, are often the critical gatekeepers of commercial readiness. Advanced Compute companies learn that ecosystem trust – specifically, the willingness of system architects and platform builders to design around a new capability – precedes market traction by a wide margin.
Taken together, TRL, MRL, and CRL create what we describe elsewhere in this series as three orthogonal axes of progress. They also highlight the nonlinear nature of Deep Tech progress. A company can be technically advanced but commercially stalled. It can be scientifically mature but manufacturing-immature. It can have eager customers but no viable route to production. Understanding which axis is the binding constraint at any given moment is, therefore, the critical Lab-to-Market leadership question.
The proliferation of readiness level frameworks beyond TRL, MRL, and CRL reflects both the strength of the original concept and the breadth of domains in which it has proved applicable. Reuse Readiness Levels for software systems, Habitation Readiness Levels for space infrastructure, Investment Readiness Levels for venture-backed innovation – each represents a innovation community's attempt to apply Sadin and Mankins' core insight to its own domain.
Why These Frameworks Matter for Deep Tech
To return to the start, the leading cause of failure in Lab-to-Market companies may not be bad technology, lack of funding, poor talent, or low levels of ambition. Rather, and from experience, it may be misaligned and/or mismanaged expectations about pace, about risk, about what 'progress' actually means at a given moment in a company's journey. TRL, R&D³, TNV, MRL, and CRL are, at their core, tools for measuring, communicating, and correcting these misalignments. Used well, they give leadership a framework for describing where they actually are, rather than where their pitch deck implies they should be.
Frameworks do no make the journey easier. What they will do is make it more legible. And in Deep Tech, legibility – the shared capacity to describe reality accurately, to communicate risk honestly, and to align expectations constructively – is itself a form of competitive advantage for the very simple reason that it builds and serves to maintain trust.
Companies that understand where they truly sit on TRL, MRL, and CRL axes consistently make better decisions about hiring, capital allocation, commercial strategy, and governance. Companies that misunderstand or misuse the tools are condemned to explain delays that were, in retrospect, predictable.
Our Conversation with Professor John Mankins
If ever there was anyone to illuminate the Lab-to-Market community on the value of a common language in advanced science, technology, and engineering, it is Professor John Mankins, the co-inventor of the framework and author of the original whitepaper. That is why we were thrilled to recently host him on the Lab to Market Leadership podcast. The opportunity to explore the original intent directly with the person who did more than almost anyone to shape how the world thinks about technology readiness.
For anyone building in Deep Tech, backing it, or governing it, we think this conversation is essential listening. This podcast will be released on 17th March 2026. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel or follow us on Apple Podcasts to be notified.
Key Sources and References
Sadin, S.R., Povinelli, F.P. & Rosen, R. (1989). 'The NASA Technology Push Towards Future Space Mission Systems.' Acta Astronautica, Vol. 20, pp. 73–77.
Mankins, J.C. (1995). Technology Readiness Levels: A White Paper. Advanced Concepts Office, Office of Space Access and Technology, NASA, Washington DC. [April 6, 1995]
Mankins, J.C. (2000). Research and Development Degree of Difficulty (R&D³): A White Paper. NASA, Washington DC.
Mankins, J.C. (2009). 'Technology Readiness Assessments: A Retrospective.' Acta Astronautica, Vol. 65, pp. 1216–1223.
US General Accounting Office (1999). Report on technology transition differences between the DoD and private industry. Washington DC.
US Department of Defense (2003/2011). Technology Readiness Assessment (TRA) Guidance Deskbook. Washington DC.
US Department of Defense. Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) Deskbook. Washington DC.
European Space Agency (2008). Technology Readiness Levels Handbook for Space Applications. ESA.
International Organization for Standardization (2013). ISO 16290:2013 — Space systems: Definition of the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) and their criteria of assessment.
Abbas, A. & Nomvar, M. Commercial Readiness Level (CRL) Framework. University of Sydney.
Olechowski, A., Eppinger, S. & Joglekar, N. (2015). 'Technology Readiness Levels at 40.' MIT Working Paper.
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