Technology roadmap
[5] Here roadmaps can be combined with other corporate foresight methods to facilitate systemic change.
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.
Committed leadership is needed because of the time and effort involved in creating a technology roadmap.
This means that the line organization must drive the process and use the roadmap to make resource allocation decisions.
7. create the technology roadmap report.In this step the common product needs are identified and are agreed on by all the participants.
In figure 3, the participants and possibly the scenario-based planning provide the common product needs.
For each of the alternatives a timeline should be estimated for how it will mature with respect to the technology driver targets.
The time horizons for e-commerce and software related sectors are usually short.
This is the moment when the roadmap must be critiqued, validated and hopefully accepted by the group involved in any implementation.
Next, there must be a periodical review and update point, because needs from the participants and the technologies evolve.
[13] This approach, called T-Plan, was created in the late 1990s primarily to help organisations take the first step into roadmapping with minimal resource and time commitment.
It has been influential in the propagation and uptake of roadmapping internationally including translations of the T-Plan workbook[14] into Chinese (traditional & modern), German, Japanese and Spanish.
The approach (as well as its counterpart for innovation and strategy roadmapping, S-Plan) is flexible and scalable, and therefore can be easily customised for efficient application.
[15] Fast and lean approaches are particularly important for small and medium enterprises (SME) and have been shown to work in particularly to give directions to clusters of SMEs.
Next to this group-process and interpersonal skills are required since the process includes a lot of discussions and finding out what the common need is.
