## 3 Method  
Due to the need of companies to be engaged in customization activities and be involved in research and development, we develop a tool able to measure both the Industry 4.0 readiness level of the company and the readiness of the technology to be applied in a specific environment. The analysis of the two levels allows us to plan the best strategy to implement, particularly as follows: (i) if the Industry 4.0 preconditions are missing, the process phase should be digitalized and connected to the IT system, (ii) if there are not specific peculiarities, an enabling technology can be integrated to improve the digitalization level of the company, and (iii) if the process or the environment to be digitalized are peculiar, a research and development activity or deep integration should be planned. To support this approach, we combine the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework with the Acatech Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index (MI) to capture both technological and organizational maturity. While the TRL evaluates the maturity of the technology itself (\"technology push\"), the MI reflects the organization's readiness to implement and capitalize on that technology (\"organization pull\"). Theoretical complementarity arises from their differing yet synergistic scopes: a piece of technology may be highly mature (a high TRL), but if the organization lacks the capabilities to integrate it effectively (a low MI), implementation success is unlikely. Similarly, a highly mature organization (a high MI) may struggle if the technology is not yet developed for its context. By integrating these two assessments, we enable a more comprehensive planning process that aligns R&D efforts, process innovation, and technology adoption within the firm's strategic capabilities. This dual-level framework is aligned with recent academic work advocating for holistic maturity assessments in digital transformation. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [42] highlight the limitations of TRL in capturing socio-organizational readiness, advocating for complementary frameworks. Furthermore, the concept of System Readiness Levels (SRLs), which combines TRLs with organizational and integration dimensions, supports this integrated approach [43]. Since we are going to measure two different indicators, a reflection on their independence and/or orthogonality is necessary. The two readiness dimensions, the Industry 4.0 level and technology level, are theoretically independent since they assess the readiness of the company with respect to the Industry 4.0 paradigm and the readiness of the specific technology to be applied in the specific context. To check the orthogonality of the two dimensions, we perform a comparative analysis based on text mining. We apply a Natural Language Processing algorithm on textual descriptions from the Wikipedia page on a technology roadmap ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap)]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap)), accessed on 25 May 2025) and the section of the official Acatech study [44] describing the maturity levels. To discern the similarities and differences between the two texts, we extract keywords by tokenizing the content, eliminating stop words and numbers, and retaining words with occurrences equal to or greater than 4--a threshold considered relevant for both texts. The resulting normalized vectors of word occurrences, shown in Appendix A, were then subjected to a cosine similarity analysis. Computing the scalar product of the two normalized vectors yielded a value of 0.077 that corresponds to an arccosine of 85.55 degrees, which shows how the two-unit vectors are almost perpendicular. The angle of about 90 degrees indicates that the two vectors of keywords' occurrences are orthogonal and thus suggests that the two domains are almost independent. This quantitative approach sheds light on the distinct thematic focuses of the technology roadmap and the Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index.