Technology roadmap

A technology roadmap is a plan that matches short-term and long-term goals with specific technology solutions to help meet those goals. It is a plan that applies to a new product or process, or to an emerging technology.

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.

The technology roadmapping process conducts three phases (see figure 1): 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.

The first phase, the preliminary phase (see figure 2), consists of 3 steps:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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