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Frontier experiences from industry-academia consortia: corporate roadmappers create value with product and technology roadmaps.

Article Excerpt
A roadmap, in its most general definition, is the view of a group of stakeholders as to how to get where they want to go--to achieve their desired objective. The purpose of a roadmap is to help the group make sure the right capabilities are in place at the right time to achieve this objective.

This very general definition of a roadmap captures the essence of roadmapping--developing a common view within a team about their future and what they want to achieve in that future. Roadmapping is a learning process for a group, in that members discover gaps and new directions. The planning activity helps the group develop a common language and thereby improve communication among its members. A roadmap can also help the group communicate its vision and plan to customers, suppliers, partners, and other groups.

Roadmaps have a variety of applications. For example, a roadmap can be used to describe the past or future development of a field of science or technology in which there may be an optimal evolution path among several alternatives. Or, roadmapping can be used to describe the future path of progress in an industry. For example, the Semiconductor Industry Roadmap describes the next ten years of progress in semiconductors, and several industry roadmaps have been developed under the leadership of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technology.

In a corporation, an important need for roadmapping is often at the product-line level, to define the plan for the evolution of a product, linking business strategy to the evolution of the product features and costs to the technologies needed to achieve the strategic objective. The roadmap combines internal development needs with a marketplace view of technology trends.

Roots of Roadmapping

While the field had its early roots in the U.S. automotive industry, it was Motorola and Corning that first championed roadmapping approaches in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coming advocated a critical events mapping approach to corporate and business unit strategy; Motorola undertook a technology evolution and positioning approach.

The Motorola approach has been more visible in the U.S. practice of technology management. Under the leadership of its then-CEO Robert Galvin, Motorola initiated a corporate-wide process with the stated purpose of "encouraging our business managers to give proper attention to their technological future, as well as to provide them with a vehicle with which to organize their forecasting process" (1). The approach was introduced to help balance long- and short-range issues, strategic and operational matters with technology and other disciplines in the company. The seminal Willyard and McClees 1987 Research Management paper describing Motorola's use and approach was the first to appear on the subject (1). The...