A technology roadmap is a flexible planning schedule to support strategic and long-range planning, by matching short-term and long-term goals with specific technology solutions. It is a plan that applies to a new product or process and may include using technology forecasting or technology scouting to identify suitable emerging technologies. It is a known technique to help manage the fuzzy front-end of innovation. It is also expected that roadmapping techniques may help companies to survive in turbulent environments and help them to plan in a more holistic way to include non-financial goals and drive towards a more sustainable development. Here roadmaps can be combined with other corporate foresight methods to facilitate systemic change.
Developing a roadmap has three major uses. It helps reach a consensus about a set of needs and the technologies required to satisfy those needs, it provides a mechanism to help forecast technology developments, and it provides a framework to help plan and coordinate technology developments. It may also be used as an analysis tool to map the development and emergence from new industries.
Process
The technology roadmapping process may be conducted in three phases: preliminary activities, the development of the roadmap, and the follow-up activities phase. Because the process is too big for one model, the phases are modeled separately. In the models no different roles are made; this is because everything is done by the participants as a group.
Phase 1: Preliminary phase
The first phase, the preliminary phase (see figure 2), consists of three steps: satisfy essential conditions, provide leadership / sponsorship, and define the scope and boundaries for the technology roadmap. In this phase the key decision makers must identify that they have a problem and that technology roadmapping can help them in solving the problem.
Satisfy essential conditions
In this step it must become clear what the conditions are (they must be identified) and if they are not met, who takes actions to meet them. These conditions include, for example: A need for the technology roadmap Input and participation from different parts of the organization (e.g., marketing, R&D, the strategic business units) with different planning horizons and perspectives. All conditions should be satisfied (or an agreed-on party takes necessary actions) to continue to the next step. The participants can have zero or more conditions of their own. It applies to all conditions that have the attribute to be met or not.
Provide leadership / sponsorship
Committed leadership is needed because of the time and effort involved in creating a technology roadmap. Additionally the leadership should come from one of the participants, one of them provides leadership and sponsorship. This means that the line organization must drive the process and use the roadmap to make resource allocation decisions.
Define the scope and boundaries
In this step the context for the roadmap is specified. In the company a vision should exist and it must be clear that the roadmap can support that vision. If the vision does not exist one should be developed and clearly stated. When that is done the boundaries and the scope of the roadmap should be specified. Furthermore, the planning horizon and the level of details should be set. The scope can be further divided into the technology scope and the participation scope.
In table 1 all the different sub-activities of the preliminary activity phase can be seen. All the sub-activities have concepts as end products (marked in bold). These concepts are the actual meta-data model, which is an adjusted class diagram.
Phase 2: Development phase
The second phase, the development of the technology roadmap phase (see figure 3.), consists of 7 steps:
Identify the product focus of the roadmap
In this step the common product needs are identified and are agreed on by all the participants. This is important to get the acceptance of all groups for the process. In case of uncertainty of the product needs scenario-based planning can be used to determine the common product needs. In figure 3, the participants and possibly the scenario-based planning provide the common product needs.
Identify the critical system requirements and their targets
Once it is decided what must be roadmapped, the critical system requirements can be identified; they provide the overall framework for the technology roadmap. The requirements can have targets (as an attribute in figure 3) like reliability and costs.