Market Readiness Level
| Overview | Best Practices | Project Attributes | Market Readiness | ||
Objective
The objective is to assess open source projects from a market perspective and provide a simple indicator of the market readiness of OW2 projects.
Scope
The OW2 MRL are a series of business-related situations that reflect the evolution of a project from initial software development to market leadership. The sequence must take into consideration the changes that must occur for a project to transform itself from a purely technology endeavour to a market powerhouse. And because we replicate the NASA TRL scale, the OW2 MRL scale also has nine levels.
The MRL score positions the project on the OW2 Market Readiness scale. Theoretically the score is a number between 0 and 10, however the scale has nine grades, a software reaches MRL 9 when it is technically mature and broadly used, supported and recognised on the market. Because software is a technical product, the MRL scale is influenced by technical determinations however they should be understood from a market point of view as if confronted to the question: what value is brought to a business user?
| OW2 MRL | Business Scale | Technology Scale | Rationale | NASA TRL |
| 9 | Established Player | Platform, Sub-Project Generation | Established product with properly financed and organized Business support, Customer base, Repeat sales and Market recognition | Flight Proven |
| 8 | Actively Competitive | Building Range (Products/Features) | Early customer base, appropriate financing or active community support, recognized software | Flight Qualified |
| 7 | Business Build-up | Full Q&A | Early customer base and fledgeling financing or active community support, Start-up | Prototype in Space |
| 6 | Market Broadening | Growing Interoperability | Proven product, improving market positioning, growing community and governance | Proven Demo |
| 5 | Market Opening | User Interface Maturing | First customers, recent market opening, fledgeling community and governance | Relevant Envt Validation |
| 4 | Usefulness Demonstrated | MVP Defined | Several users, project leadership well established | Lab Validation |
| 3 | Fledgeling Usefulness | Golden Scenario | One declared user (can be internal) with declared project leader | Proof of Concept |
| 2 | Development | POC | Basic R&D code developed with one demonstrated use case, some documentation | Application Formulation |
| 1 | Research | Methodology & Algorithms | Basic R&D code developed | Basic Principles |
Data Collection
Information is collected via a structured interview with the project leaders and recorded in a form. Questions are not boolean and the form is only here to record the project market situation in the given category. Follow this link for a full list of market situations verified by the methodology and an exemple of the data collection form.
Computation
The market capabilities are combined with the project attributes to provide the Market Readiness Level (MRL) score. The MRL score is the computed average of 12 values: seven Capabilities values and five Attribute values.
| Market Capabilities | Project Attributes | ||
| Product | Activity | | |
| Community | Community | ||
| Support | Compliance | ||
| Customers | Quality | ||
| Sales | Sustainability | ||
| Finances | |||
| Recognition |
Results
The result is simply a number between 0 and 9. That's the whole point of all these efforts! The MRL is published in the shape of a cursor positioned along a single vertical bar.
Stage 3: Market capabilities < Previous
