Many of you have been interested in our earlier article that touched on the subject of foresight and its role in enhancing outcomes from technology roadmap projects.

The point to foresighting is its ability to describe different possible futures.

Each scenario, if it were to unfold, would call for different strategies and have different implications for how a range of solutions might be called upon by end users.

No matter what reality might emerge, there are real choices to be made about what areas and goals to address and how to drive innovation initiatives toward particular objectives.

Of course this has direct implications for which technology development paths to invest in, which innovation partnerships to convene and how organizations will work and relate to changes in technology and the most productive open innovation strategies to deploy – which technologies are core and peripheral?

As in the adage “fortune favours the prepared mind” – thinking through and managing a portfolio of possibilities and uncertainties helps an organisation to ensure that its innovation investments are not taking them down a low probability path or blind alleyway.

For better prepared innovators, scenarios can assist in more effectively defining an appropriate portfolio balance across innovation platforms.

Scenario planning is a methodology designed to help guide groups and individuals to explore the many ways in which innovation might evolve.

It is a creative process that begins by identifying forces of change in the world, then combining those forces in different ways to create a set of diverse stories — or scenarios — about how the future could evolve.

Scenarios are designed to stretch thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might present. They explore, through narrative, descriptions of possible events and dynamics how planned or totally new innovation trajectories might alter, be inhibited, or enhanced by such shifts, often in surprising ways.

Together, a set of scenarios captures a range of future possibilities, good and bad, expected and surprising – but always plausible. Importantly, scenarios are not predictions. Rather, they are thoughtful story telling that enables us to imagine, and then to rehearse, different strategies for how to be more prepared for the future – or more ambitiously, how to help shape better futures ourselves.

This shaping part gives rise to interesting “what if” questioning that allows us to propose new innovation trajectories and initial totally new explorations. In this way, by including scenarios concerning the future, technology road maps can get beyond describing incremental advancements in today’s known universe to anticipate innovation challenges likely to unfold in the event of large shifts.

In an increasingly uncertain global environment the practice of scenario planning has much to offer in informing technology roadmapping. It could play a pivotal role in helping to translate technology roadmapping into innovation roadmapping.