Roadmaps for Reducing Innovation Failure

Jeffrey Phillips makes an important contribution to our understanding of the innovation process by identifying the principal causes of innovation failure. In a recent post, he states that  innovations fail in the marketplace based on one or more of four key issues:

1. Ideas don’t solve an important problem for a customer
2. Ideas take too long to get to market/shifts in needs
3. Ideas underfunded or poorly launched
4. Ideas require too much work to adopt

One of the ways that a high quality technology roadmap identifies itself to its readers, is the extent to which it delivers insights that helps avoid these modes of failure. Lets take a look at the various aspects of roadmapping that help to minimise innovation failure. To assist you to visualise and apply such approaches to your own situation, I’ll include some examples drawn from existing roadmaps.

Important Problems

In a recently published roadmap the integrated timber and paper manufacturing industries in the US identified six important innovation themes. The clarity of communication was enhanced by using a graphic that depicts each of the priorities across the industry value chain and relates it to a chapter within the roadmap document.

Six broad priorities were identified:

• reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption
• reduce fresh water use by 50%
• increase biomass supply
• increase value from biomass
• enable new products and new product features
• increase recovery and recycling of wood products.

As you might expect, if you are developing a project and it happens to address one of these six priorities then there is likely to be a greater chance that a business in the timber industry will actually sit up and listen.

However, by analysing other material within the roadmap, even more detailed guidance is available. For each of these six priority areas, several top priority R&D needs were described.  Lets pick the first priority and focus on energy consumption.

Energy sources typically constitute the third largest cost component for the forest products industry. Overall, the industry is the third most energy intensive industry after petroleum and chemicals. The roadmap states that since 2002, energy input from renewable sources has grown to 64 percent, and fossil fuel usage has declined. To continue this trend, almost all fossil fuel consumption in integrated pulp and paper mills can be eliminated through the development of new process technologies, the adoption of best available technologies and by using renewable fuels from biorefineries integrated with pulp mills.

As a result, the industry has identified four top priority R&D needs related to achieving its energy efficiency priorities:

1. Generate Power and Energy More Efficiently with 25% Lower GHG Emissions
2. Reduce Energy Intensity in Manufacturing by 25%
3. Eliminate Use of Fossil Fuels
4. Reduce CO2 Emissions with Novel Mill-Based Capture Techniques

The roadmap supplies further details and several layers of metrics identifying desired performance targets through what it terms “pathway maps”. Each pathway map presents seven perspectives about the Priority R&D Need:

1. a detailed description of the R&D need
2. current “state of the art” in technology and knowledge
3. end state specifications for the kind of technology solutions effective R&D should ultimately lead to
4. key knowledge and/or technology advancements required
5. impacts on industry/society that can be used to justify funding
6. anticipated barriers
7. additional information that might be helpful.

As logic suggests, if you are developing a project that promotes energy efficiency, you are likely to gain some traction with the timber industry since this is amongst their top six innovation priorities. However, if your energy efficiency project can be directly mapped to achievement of reducing black liquor concentration by 50% (as defined in the R&D Need example) and your project is able to meet the metrics defined in the End State Specifications for the Technology Solution then your industry representative is likely to snap to attention and roll out the red carpet. You have successfully connected with an important problem!

So the important take away from this discussion is that if you are an innovator it is possible to review roadmap documents to seek out detailed information about specific problems for which customers are actively seeking solutions.

Missing the Window of Opportunity

All opportunities are time related and innovation opportunities are no different. Roadmaps address this issue by putting performance metrics against time scales. Often, as is the case with the example to the left, this is presented graphically with particular technology achievement targets arrayed across multiple three year time windows into the future. If you have developed a project and want to understand how timely it is from an industry’s perspective then all you need to do is review the roadmap timeline.

A well founded roadmap also assists the reader to understand shifts in needs – whether a window of opportunity is opening or about to be slammed shut!  To achieve this, a roadmap includes scenarios – rich textured stories about the circumstances under which a major change is, or is likely to, become apparent and the effects that the shifts brought about by the change will deliver. Reviewing scenarios and identifying the implications for the demand for your product or service  can help minimise the likelihood of a project being scuttled by an unexpected shift in customer need.

Underfunding; Poorly Launched:

If an innovator clearly understands the nature of the client problems, appreciates the complication and barriers to implementation and has a clear perspective on the timing of the window of opportunity then the project has a great deal of information that can be used to establish its budget. The absence of such information contributes the expected surprises that commonly leads to underfunding.

Roadmaps can also assist new product launches. Often the organisation responsible for orchestrating the roadmap preparation maintains links with all those organisations and individuals that contributed to the development of the roadmap and these links may be able to be used to promote the development of solutions called for by the roadmap. Roadmap documents commonly list the contributors and organisation affiliations of those involved in preparing the roadmap.

Adoption Dynamics Misunderstood:

Requiring too much work to adopt is equivalent to saying that the “solution” has been developed without factoring in the commercial and practical limitations or complications that must be routinely dealt with by industry. For instance, continuing with our energy consumption example, in the Waste Heat recovery Technology Roadmap numerous barriers impact the economy and effectiveness of heat recovery equipment and impede their wider installation. Many of these barriers are interrelated and can generally be categorised as related to cost, scale of solution, temperature restrictions, chemical composition of materials, application specifics, and inaccessibility/transportability of heat sources. Unless these limitations are understood and factored into a proposed solution, the risk is that the solution will not meet the customers needs effectively. The table “Appreciating Barriers …” communicates very succinctly the key issues and potential solutions.

Concluding Remarks

The issue at hand here, is that by considering some of the fundamental points of roadmapping practice – and by looking at roadmaps that already exist in your industry space – you are well on the way to avoiding these missteps in innovation practice. Unfortunately, as in the case illustrated above, it is uncommon to find that each individual roadmap includes every one of the important innovation risk reduction insights. Therefore, as illustrated in this case, there is much to be gained from reviewing the population of roadmaps relevant to your innovation space. By looking at several roadmap documents, you can harvest and then connect the insights to give you a thorough appreciation of the innovation realities operating in the target space .

Geoffrey Phillips’ four key issues for innovation failure help to illustrate one angle on the value to be gained by preparing for innovation.  We have written more about this here.

Tags: strategy
Posted in Innovation, strategy, technology roadmap. Permalink for this post: permalink.