Overview

Bridging the gap over the valley of death is the purpose of technology transition programs and is not a new challenge for the Navy. However, these initiatives usually focus on technology development, not on the adoption side of the transition gap. The Navy created the Adoption Readiness Level framework to assist transition managers with this challenge. This thesis compares the ARL framework to other popular frameworks found in literature and uses them to analyze five cases of energy and environmental technologies in order to draw conclusions regarding common barriers to technology adoption on Navy installations. The research found that adoption was defined as the point when all associated technical specifications, codes, and standards were updated to reflect the new technology. It was generally assumed that decisions regarding technology adoption are made based on rational factors such as functional and economic advantage. However, cultural conflicts across various professional communities presented a significant challenge to achieving the level of acceptance needed to facilitate technology adoption. Factors that contributed to positive outcomes included understanding the culture of the professional communities that serve as critical change agents and targeting those groups through strategic communications. The ARL framework can be improved by more specifically addressing culture, the role of change agents, and the need for strategic communications at the earliest level. This study is laid out in six chapters. The first chapter introduces the research and provides background information on technology transition programs used within the DOD and Navy, and lays out the organization of the study. Chapter II provides a review of existing literature related to innovation research and barriers to technology adoption, and ties the ARL framework to that literature. Chapter III presents case studies of energy and environmental technology projects. Chapter IV presents a qualitative analysis of the case studies and Chapter V provides final conclusions and recommendations. This research takes a multi-case study approach. The unit of analysis used is a case study on a demonstration project written based on interviews with transition managers at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (EXWC) in Port Hueneme, California. The EXWC Technical Director identified four subject matter experts (SME) across various technology transition programs for interviews. Standardized interview questions were emailed to the SMEs in advance of the interviews. The SMEs identified projects for discussion and presented them to the author during interviews conducted at EXWC on February 6-7, 2018. Case studies were written based on selected energy and environmental technology projects demonstrated on military installations that highlighted the challenges of transitioning technologies that were adopted and those that failed to be adopted. The strategy of the case analysis is the application of theoretical propositions with rival explanations. The technique used is pattern-matching with cross-case synthesis. The various theoretical models and frameworks explored during the literature review were applied to each case to identify common themes that might explain the adoption outcomes.

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