Technologyroadmap.net performs analytics on populations of existing roadmaps for the purposes of informing decision making in innovation. As a result, we have benefited from reviewing a very large number of roadmap documents – seeing what works well and is most important.
As a result, our distillation of the components that should be included in a roadmap designed to enable well informed innovation investment decisions is as follows:
- introduction, intended audience and dominant perspective of the roadmap
- present status of the “space” using social, political, economic, sustainability and other indicators
- state of the art (description of technology/innovation platform/s and (tech and customer) metrics that define their performance)
- description of major drivers, trends and shifts impacting or that could impact the space
- characterization of how such changes are likely to manifest (anticipated scenarios) emphasizing the impact that the shifts will have on client/end user demand (and therefore how this may drive/reshape value appreciation for relevant products/services and define the major themes of innovation in the sector, into the future)
- limitations, problems, capability gaps, and practical difficulties/frustrations encountered in putting current and anticipated new solutions into practice from the customer as well as the supplier perspective – (section highlighting how these might prove especially problematic if scenario A or C becomes reality)
- definition of the major innovation theme(s) required to a) respond to shifts in client requirements b) overcome limitations/etc together with an assessment of relative importance/urgency
- for each theme, develop a statement(s) of “innovation progression” identifying major achievements across the time period judged to be relevant to the sector – commonly 15 to 30 years, sometimes out 50 years into the future
- unpack the projects and sub-projects required to bring each theme into reality and redefine (re-chunk) these work elements into related themes as discrete projects with defined performance metrics (some (near term) will be able to be specified in detail together with required performance metrics, others further out may be defined more qualitatively with target maturity levels over time
- summary of major themes and decision points designed to enable the next step in the process – the translation of prioritized projects into programs and projects with appropriate commitments of resources to bring them into being.
An approach like this enables the definition of requirements that anticipate the need for introduction of “paradigm shift” solutions versus a simple linear progression of incremental performance advancement by the current dominant technology over time.
In our view roadmapping efforts would be significantly more useful if they devoted more attention to items 4, 5 and 6 above.
One of the benefits of assessing multiple roadmaps relevant to a particular industry or technology platform is that in the past it has been rare for any one document to contain each of these elements. However, by considering an array of relevant documents, written from different perspectives, the reader benefits by assembling a more comprehensive and cohesive view.
... your ability to understand the problem and search out paradigm shift solutions from unexpected sources has opened up a major value-creating opportunity for our organisation that has resulted in the definition of our RemSAL™ and RemCARB™ products.