The term "technology roadmapping" was coined in the 1980s by Motorola for the process they were using to help develop technical strategies. Since then the technique has become much more widespread, driven by the rapidly changing technical environment in which modern business operates. Indeed, technical innovations may now find their way into products so fast that products such as laptop computers have a shelf life sometimes measured in weeks. Although this is an extreme example, it highlights the necessity for techniques to help identify technically related business and research priorities.
Technology roadmaps have been developed and published in many forms but are usually diagrammatic and often supported by tables and text. They might be specific to the needs of one company, such as an automotive manufacture, and are therefore highly confidential, or they might try to describe an important technology, such as fuel cells, and be used in efforts to influence public funding and private investment over a broader sector. Whatever the type and purpose of a roadmap, a particular challenge is the need to keep it up to date.
As a KTN we are committed to producing high quality technology roadmaps as part of our Technology Watch library. We seek consultation from our members and other interested parties in their production. Outputs from these roadmaps are fed back to inform government we future policies and strategies are being defined.