Roadmapping Roadmapping: Strategic planning for roadmapping systems

Abstract

Roadmapping is a well-established technique in the context of innovation and strategy, with the potential to support organizations address the complex transformative challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. This is enabled by its systems-based architecture and visual form of roadmaps, supporting communication and reduction of information asymmetries in complex sociotechnical systems. This paper focuses on an adaptation of the roadmapping method to support strategic planning for roadmapping systems in organizations, addressing implementation challenges. This represents a novel application of roadmapping to business processes and systems, demonstrating the flexibility of the roadmapping approach. A workshop template (‘R2’) and process for supporting the roadmapping of roadmapping systems is presented, developed and refined through a series of six industrial cases, and illustrated with an application example in the additive manufacturing sector.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

roadmapping / strategic planning / innovation management

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to collaborating organizations for enabling the development and testing of the approach described in this paper, academic colleagues (Clare Farrukh, Dr Michèle Routley, Dr Clive Kerr, Dr Imoh Ilevbare, Dr Nicky Athanassopoulou), and the University of Cambridge STIM industry-academic consortium program for feedback and providing access for template testing.

Declaration of competing interests

The Star Rapid case study reported in Section 4 was initially supported by IfM Engage, a not-for-profit knowledge transfer company, embedded within the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and wholly owned by the University of Cambridge, with the remit of applying, disseminating and transfer research outputs from IfM. The authors Clemens Chaskel, Ricardo Gonzalez Nakazawa, and Jonathan Ross are Industrial Associates of IfM Engage, and Robert Phaal is a non-paid Director of IfM Engage and a member of the Frontiers of Engineering Management journal editorial board. Jonathan Ross had a leadership role within Star Rapid during the duration of the longitudinal case study. No funding was received for the research described in this paper, nor to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. The initial application of the R2 approach within Star Rapid was funded as part of a consulting project delivered by IfM Engage.

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