Resource
A technology can be ready and still fail. Understanding both Technology Readiness and Societal Readiness, and why the second decides success as often as the first.
Most people in innovation know Technology Readiness Levels: the nine-point NASA scale for how mature a technology is. Far fewer know its essential counterpart, Societal Readiness Levels, which measure how ready society is to adopt, trust, and benefit from that technology. Reading the two together is one of the most useful things an innovator, funder, or researcher can do, and getting it wrong is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in the field.
This page explains both, with proper references, and offers each as a downloadable guide.
TRL originated at NASA in the 1970s. Stan Sadin formulated the first seven-level scale in 1974, and John Mankins expanded and codified the nine-level version in a 1995 white paper that still defines the framework today. It spread from spaceflight across the US government, the European Space Agency, the European Commission, and deep-tech investment, becoming a near-universal language for technical maturity.
The nine levels run from a first observed principle (TRL 1) through laboratory and relevant-environment validation (TRL 4 to 6) to a system proven in operation (TRL 9). Each level is evidence-gated: it must be demonstrated, not merely asserted.
TRL's strength is precise, shared language for technical risk. Its limitation is equally important: it measures whether a technology works in its intended environment, not whether society is ready to adopt, govern, trust, and benefit from it. A technology can reach TRL 9 and still fail on contact with the real world.
Download: Technology Readiness Levels, explained (PDF, 10 pages) →
SRL is the axis TRL cannot see, and the one closest to the heart of the Lab's work. It emerged from Innovation Fund Denmark, which formalised a nine-level SRL scale in 2018 and asked applicants to assess it alongside TRL. From there it became a research field: Bruno and colleagues (2020) extended the readiness logic to legal, organisational, and societal dimensions; Bernstein and colleagues (2022) built the Societal Readiness Thinking Tool and embedded SRL within Responsible Research and Innovation; and more recent work treats social and technical readiness as fundamentally inseparable, centring equity and justice at every level.
SRL inverts TRL's starting point. Where TRL begins inside the technology and asks how mature it is, SRL begins with a societal need and asks whether an innovation genuinely meets it, in co-operation with the stakeholders it affects. Its nine levels run from identifying a societal problem (SRL 1) through testing solutions with stakeholders in real context (SRL 4 to 6) to an innovation proven in society (SRL 9).
Download: Societal Readiness Levels, explained (PDF, 8 pages) →
The reason to read TRL and SRL together is a single failure mode: high technical readiness, low societal readiness. A technology proven to work that society is not ready to accept. This is where expensive failures cluster, contested infrastructure, mistrusted digital systems, rejected energy projects, and where TRL alone gives false confidence.
A serious readiness assessment reads both axes at once. A technology that is TRL 8 but SRL 3 is not, in any meaningful sense, ready. The number that matters is the pair.
An SRL scale is only as good as the evidence behind each level. Deciding whether a solution has genuinely reached, say, SRL 5, validated in the relevant context in co-operation with stakeholders, is a fieldwork judgement. It requires reaching the stakeholders, hearing what they actually experience, and reading who is included and who is left out.
That is precisely the Lab's competence. Our field research turns an SRL level from an assertion into a substantiated judgement, and our posture, social science first, technical literacy alongside, maps directly onto the two-axis model. Most assessment starts from TRL and treats society as an afterthought. The Lab starts from the societal axis, because a socio-technical question is a human question first.
The guides above carry full citations. Key sources include Mankins (1995) and the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook for TRL; and Innovation Fund Denmark (2018), Bruno et al. (2020), and Bernstein et al. (2022) for SRL. Full reference lists are in the downloadable PDFs.
Related reading: Capability Is the Slow Part on why adopting-side readiness is the binding constraint on transition speed, and Strategic Is Not the Same as Financeable on why a fourth readiness dimension, financial, decides whether a technically ready project actually gets built. For the R&D-stage service that turns an asserted SRL into a substantiated one, see Research & Development Support. For the Lab's other frameworks and methods, see Resources. For how the Lab applies readiness thinking in practice, see What We Do. To discuss a study, see Contact.