Executive Summary

This project explores and characterises demonstration environments, addressing the lack of shared definitions and inconsistent use of labels that can lead to misalignment in funding decisions, access arrangements, service provision, and organisational responsibility.

Unclear and uncertain requirements and performance criteria required for demonstration environments, which may differ in each particular case, can negatively impact technology development and commercialisation.

Real world demonstration environments seldom serve a single purpose. They often help to address multiple risks at different levels of maturity (technological, manufacturing, system, etc.). They are also embedded within a multi-layered system which, if not defined properly, adds to the complexity around definitions and labels.

Based on literature review of policy and academic work, we characterise the different types of risks that various demonstration environments may be addressing. We propose that by framing demonstration environments in terms of the risks that they help to ‘de-risk’, more concrete characterisation of demonstration environments may be possible – benefiting both funders and users in terms of sharpening language and requirements.