Technology Readiness Levels Demystified

NASA - At NASA, as in the rest of the research community, these grades are called technology readiness levels, or TRLs. Each TRL represents the evolution of an idea from a thought, perhaps written on a cocktail napkin or the back of an envelope, to the full deployment of a product in the marketplace.

A NASA researcher, Stan Sadin, conceived the first scale in 1974. It had seven levels...