Innovation Roadmapping is a form of strategic planning for innovation. The Roadmapping process captures information and knowledge about innovation and presents it on a timeline. The information include topics such as: objectives, strategies, market requirements, product or service plans, technology plans, performance metrics and capability plans. The timeline is normally from the present day to 20 to 30 years into the future.

Innovation roadmapping is usually a four step process:

• developing an understanding of the major changes impacting an industry
• looking at the structure of the market and the relative positioning of participants
• creating a technology landscape by looking at how the most important value creating technologies are likely to be developed and used
• once this is achieved, it is possible to analyse how the changes identified in the first step may lead to shifts in the needs or requirements of the marketplace. This helps expose the innovation efforts most likely to lead to valuable results.

An Innovation Roadmap systematises how the impact of potential innovations might be assessed by presenting them in the context of the industry value system. An example of an industry value system for aquaculture is presented here.

An innovation roadmapping process focuses on evaluating marketplace needs as they shift in response to the forces of change. By making a deliberate effort to dissect and understand the ‘market’, ‘technology’ and ‘change’ components of an industry, we maximise the likelihood that investments will be directed towards innovations likely to have the greatest impact on productivity advancement.

Technology mining describes the process of distilling insights from large data sets to develop a clear picture of innovation activities. Technology Mining can be used to inform innovation roadmapping activities by analysing data from academic and industry journals, conference proceedings and patents.

Ordinarily, innovation roadmapping efforts invite a group of knowledgable people to attend one or more workshops. The Workshop draws on their input to help shape a set of decisions about innovation. The use of expert opinion is certainly laudable, particularly when compared to the alternative of uninformed arbitrary choices (guessing). However, with advancements in computing power, sophisticated software and data organisation we can now do much better than this. By using this rich base of information we can gain insights into what is happening world wide in innovation in a particular field and importantly in other fields of innovation that could also be usefully applied.

Technology Mining informs participants in the roadmapping effort where innovation efforts are positioned against what others are doing to identify novel approaches, locate potential collaborators and identify the best option for commercialising the most promising applications. Participants have the opportunity to consider a rich innovation landscape, backed by explicit information.

Use the term roadmap and people often think ’street directory’ - and indeed an innovation roadmap holds many of the characteristics of a street directory, but with some important distinctions!

A street directory is consulted to determine the best route to take. The driver compares the destination with the current location and looks at the major roads to be used for the journey. The driver knows the current location (Point A) and looks at the directory to locate the destination (Point B). Point B can be determined with some precision, usually by identifying the intersection of major roads nearby. The roads between A and B are well known and located on the map clearly. Major and minor roads are often distinguished from one another. The driver is able to identify all roads between A and B and make a judgement about the best and most efficient overall route (amongst many potential alternative routes) by applying suitable decision making criteria.

With an innovation roadmap, the current status of an innovation setting can be described. This is equivalent to Point A. The desired future state can be projected, and what this will look like can be rendered in some detail. This is equivalent to Point B. Then, it is possible to consider the issues that may influence the choice of route from Point A to Point B and make some decisions to define the route. All this makes the directory sound very similar to an innovation roadmap.

Unfortunately, big problems emerge when you attempt to draw parallels between innovation and the process of consulting a street directory. For a start, almost all drivers arrive at the desired destination, even if it is a little frustrated and later than planned. This is completely at odds to the typical innovation experience, where the probability of failure is nine in ten. Inconveniently, the roadmap to the future does not contain each of the roads to the destination. The major and minor pathways to future innovation are often unclear and intersections near the destination correspondingly indistinct. Routinely, there are no clear indicators of the best route and several must be tried until it becomes apparent which is likely to be the most fruitful. Innovation may also fail because the ‘common sense’ criteria you apply can be precisely wrong.

With the ever hastening pace of change, there may be some tracks in the sand into the future, but there is nothing like a set of roads to guide us to our destination. Looking 20 or 30 years forward can seem like standing at an abrupt discontinuation of a major freeway, peering off the edge of the tarmac towards the horizon, unsure about which gap in the bushes represents a viable path. Clearly, at this point, our roadmap analogy has struck a few corrugations (or even potholes). In fact, it is worse than this. How then can we make innovation decisions when operating in such a ‘fact lite’ environment? Indeed, do innovation roadmaps have any utility at all?

First, don’t give up hope. We are not lost explorers in the outback or jungle. We will probably never have the level of certainty implied by a street directory (or a GPS for that matter) but we do have some tools (an old compass or theodolite perhaps?) to help us make our way. We also have some broad learnings about what does and does not work in innovation and the beginnings of an understanding about why this might be the case. Succeeding in innovation requires a new set of rules and special thought processes.

In an innovation roadmap

• we know some things about a start point but none of us possess perfect information about the economy, market or innovation activities
• we are able to describe the desired future state but usually only with fuzzy terminology
• we might be able to pick out some signposts that indicate directions towards creating the future, but the ones that should be taken note of and the probability we should assign to the prospect for success is highly uncertain
• if we ask potential customers for directions they may send us in completely the wrong direction
• the one certainty is that we are facing ever increasing and ever more transformational change in society, the environment and the economy

What we understand about innovation roadmapping is:

• developing an effective roadmap is not about extrapolating what is happening now into the future
• it is more about working backwards from standing in the future making sure that full account is taken of major changes that are happening or predicted
• the changes are important since they are most responsible for shifting customer perceptions about products and the importance and satisfaction with their attributes and benefits
• technological innovation and new capabilities will be one of the major changes that should be considered
• the use of expert opinion adds rigour to interpreting weak signals, particularly when compared to the alternative of uninformed arbitrary choices (guessing)
• advancements in computing power, sophisticated software and data organisation allow us to create information landscapes from large data sets that provide world wide insights into innovation

Innovation Roadmaps have become popular tools because they do make a very worthwhile contribution to success in innovation. We do however need to read them and use thought processes that are more appropriate to innovation than the processes of using a street directory.

Posts in this series will unfold the structure, function and processes of innovation roadmapping and make plain how this important tool can be used to promote successful innovation, create a blueprint for collaboration in innovation and help direct open innovation efforts towards effective outcomes.