The Process

The Technology Roadmapping Process conducts 3 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. Only the first two phases are considered. 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, consists of 3 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 have to be identified) and if they are not met that somebody will take the actions necessary to meet the unmet conditions. These conditions include for example the following: there must be a need for the technology roadmap, input and participation from several different parts of the organization (e.g. marketing, R&D, the Strategic Business Units ) with different planning horizons and different perspectives and the process should be needs driven. All the conditions should be satisfied (or someone is going to take the actions necessary) in order to continue to the next step. The participants can have zero or more conditions of their own. It applies to all the conditions that they have the attribute to be met or not.

Provide leadership / sponsorship
Committed leadership is needed because time and effort is involved in creating the technology roadmap. Additionally the leadership should come from one of the participants, one of them provides leadership / 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 for the technology roadmap
In this step the context for the roadmap will be 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.