Directing Technology to Win the Future
Planning for innovation involves being able to time new technology releases coincident with budding market demands. Communication of the strategic innovation plan allows the entire workforce to focus priorities on the most important development work at the right time. One popular visual planning and communication tool is the technology roadmap. Roadmapping is an inherently flexible technique (1).
What is a Roadmap?
Strauss and Radnor have presented a concise description of the strategy and purpose behind technology roadmaps (2).
A roadmap is a visual tool that identifies and describes specific customer requirement-driven technology clusters and specific discontinuities and critical requirements related to technology decisions.
In other words, the roadmap is a plan that matches short-term and long-term business goals with solutions to help achieve those goals (3).
To best prepare for the future, the roadmap is a tool used to develop an integrated product-technology plan that meets both market and business requirements with product features and technology choices that are prioritized on a basis of customer’s needs and desires (1).
Similar to Bruce Lyne’s “Voice of Technology” technique (4), the technology and research drivers from a variety of sources are input to the process with outputs of threats and opportunities, which lead to actions in New Product Development (NPD), as well as business strategies and technology platforms.
Roadmapping is a strategic planning process itself and many proponents of the plan argue that the communication during the roadmap design is even more important than the final document. (4) Technology Roadmapping provides a method to ensure investments in technology are aligned with deployment of new capabilities that are required to exploit future market opportunities (5).
Specifically, a technology roadmap (2) should:
- Incorporate product attributes,
- Lay out actions over time to achieve defined goals,
- Identify links to related development requirements,
- Allocate resources for priority projects, and
- Define an evolution plan for core products and platforms.
Strategic Value of Roadmapping
Roadmapping serves as a foundation that enables a firm to respond to varying customer demands for new product features, functions, and price points (2). As
a result of technology roadmapping, companies are positioned to make better investment decisions (6). With the roadmap, a firm seeks to decompose complex systems into specific, actionable subsystems and elements (7).
Being able to describe significant market changes while simultaneously identifying any potential misalignments among key strategies is the key deliverable of a technology roadmap. Senior management is thus not blind-sided by fast emerging, disruptive technology (8).
Roadmaps help to manage different technologies in the portfolio (9):
- Base developments,
- Differentiating products, and
- Breakthrough projects.
Additionally, the technology roadmap helps senior management identify the source of required technical developments:
- Internal or external research,
- Partnering and open innovation, and
- Acquisition (licensing or merger).
One reason that technology investments are unable to achieve sustainable competitive advantage is that research and development (R&D) spending is “de-coupled” from other business planning processes (5).
Roadmapping as a Communications Tool
Technology roadmapping can vastly change a corporation’s ability to understand its resources and links to product needs over time (9). A completed roadmap offers a comprehensive picture of the market arenas, customers and end-users, product attributes, and technology space in which the firm strives to be competitive.
A recent survey by The Idea Leadership Company reinforced the stereotypical differences in expectations and characterizations of communications between technologists and non-scientists. Use of jargon and making decisions without data were noted as conflicts that restrain open and beneficial communications between these groups. Meanwhile, both parties expressed a strong desire to collaborate toward common goals (10).
Technology and Product Roadmaps help to bridge these communication gaps by sharing strategic goals graphically and visually between executive level decision makers and working level NPD teams (9). In fact, many believe that the application of roadmapping itself is what adds value to the firm (11; 7; 1).
In fact, one of the biggest benefits observed at Motorola from roadmapping was gaining acceptance of future direction by all team members (8). Roadmaps help to articulate the organization’s goals and link specific actions with strategic intent (7).
Many roadmaps use a temporal dimension, helping to demonstrate the critical time-to-market pathway for companies requiring high degrees of synchronization across multiple business units (1). Using time as a key variable allows easy translation of a multi-layer strategic roadmap to individual project plans (e.g. Gantt charts).
The graphical presentation of the product portfolio (past, today, near-, mid-, and long-term future) in a roadmap allows global companies like GM to eliminate
redundant projects (12). A well-defined roadmap allows all participants to see how their actions impact and influence the tasks of other in executing the firm’s strategy (13).
Above all, the roadmap as a communication tool can enhance collaborations among key stakeholders: technologists, non-scientists, engineering, procurement, marketing, suppliers, and management.
Read about the Limitations of Roadmapping.
Image of roadmap courtesy of Flickr.
Image of playing chess courtesy of Flickr.
Image of bridge courtesy of Freefoto.com.
Image of car courtesy of Flickr.
© 2011 Global NP Solutions, LLC
