TRL – Does this type of innovation work?

NASSA got themselves lost in trying to develop too many new things at the same time and got things confused as to which thing was at what stage of development and testing. So they developed TRLs. Technology Readiness Levels. This soon became popular and, through various academic institutes, became a standard manner to measure and track innovation development for widget products.

Funding soon began to follow these trends with fund releases based on miles tone TRL4 and 8 that drove teams to work smarter and faster. Brilliant ideas for both NASSA and many other organisations were developed using this terminology. But it lacked full scalability to cover other sectors. So the model expanded to include MRLs – Manufacturing Readiness Levels and then SCRLs – Supply Chain Readiness Levels. The academics and accountants could track progress and funding with a whole set of acronyms and tick boxes.

Then we found Lean Startup methodologies, and then AI and all these went out the window…. Sorry, Academics and Accountants.

But new entrepreneurs were now developing entire solutions with a number of iterations in hours, not weeks and months. New products are 3D printed, tested, redesigned, re-printed, moulded and manufactured all in the same day. SaaS products and done in minutes with code generators and implemented across networks within hours.

Just this week, I wrote an AI prompt to write an application that asked questions to them to write a prompt to write an app for a client. All before lunch. TRL no more.

But is this getting out of hand? Yes and No. Too much too fast is never a good thing. NASSA found that out the hard way. Maybe humanity is on the trajectory to a shuttle burnup, too and will help reset us all. Or not.