Technology roadmapping is a collaborative process that predicts the development timeline of a technology. It is undertaken by large companies and combines past trends with educated guesses to determine R&D barriers and opportunities. It has been applied to various industries and can lead to product roadmaps.
Technology roadmapping is a collaborative forecasting process that solicits the opinions of various experts to create a best guess of a development timeline for a particular technology. Technology roadmaps tend to look a few years to a couple of decades into the future. Other than that, the prediction becomes very nebulous and speculative. Technology roadmapping is a process usually undertaken by consultants of large companies interested in the future of technology in their market niche.
Some technologies may be too expensive to implement as soon as they are conceived, but will bring a return on investment when the cost of the underlying materials or manufacturing processes falls below a critical threshold. For example, computer chip makers realize that eventually using photolithography to make integrated circuits will reach a point of diminishing returns, after which it would be prudent to have alternative plans in place to make better chips. Some technology roadmapping projects attempt to do just that, investigating alternatives for chip manufacturing including DNA computing, 3D computing, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and the like.
Technology roadmapping is an intuitive phrase that basically means “corporate sponsored futurism”. Technology roadmaps are expected to be somewhat rigorous and quantitative in nature, combining past trends with educated guesses about capital costs to determine R&D barriers and opportunities for a particular technology or technology application. Technology roadmapping not only asks how difficult it would be to develop a new technology, but what development path should be taken and in what context the technology might emerge. A spin-off of a technology roadmapping project could be a product roadmap, which focuses on a specific product and the challenges in manufacturing and implementation.
Technology roadmapping has been applied to pharmaceuticals, aerospace, manufacturing, nanotechnology, power generation, electronics and many other industries. No technology roadmapping effort will ever be 100% correct, but many companies view these roadmaps as better than nothing and spend millions developing them.
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