Assessment of the advancement of market-upstream innovations and of the performance of research and innovation projects

The assessment of the advancement of technological innovations at their development stage is a difficult task, but important to judge on the performance of innovation projects. Assessments have so far been made by assessing technical characteristics, subjectively, or by counting patents. This paper proposes an approach to assess the advancement of market-upstream innovations directly and objectively, through the advancement of their technological maturity. On this basis, also the innovation performance of larger projects that were put in place to progress one or several innovations, can be assessed. The paper presents an exploratory qualitative multi-case study of 54 innovative technologies at different maturity levels, that were developed in 5 market-upstream large technological research and innovation projects with mostly engineering and IT dimensions, funded by the European Union’s Research and Innovation Programmes under its sub-programme “Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies”. From extensive documentation and data from interviews, a refined technology readiness scale and a scoring method that reflects the increase in the required efforts to advance the maturity of the innovations is developed. The findings provide groundwork for future research on market-upstream innovation and how the innovation performance of projects can be measured at the early stages of the innovation process.