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One World, One Industry: Mastering Technology Prognostication

Technological road mapping plays a fundamental role in many companies’ innovation strategies. While doing product development and organizational planning in the industry, I found roadmaps to be excellent tools for strategic and future planning. They are a crucial skill in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape.

While I would love to have a crystal ball that was as detailed and as accurate as our GPS mapping tools that I worked so hard to develop a couple of decades ago, that just isn’t the reality. Technology roadmaps are more like “routing by billboards” than utilizing road signs with specific turns and street names.

Billboards advertise potential; they give you general information without many specifics. Technology roadmaps are somewhat similar. We believe each new technological marvel will lead us to the promised land, but they can quickly go by the wayside to obsolescence as our landscape shifts and changes rapidly. I remember being incredibly excited by the prospect of FMD-ROM. It was light years ahead of DVD and even better than Blu-ray, but I would wager most of you have never even heard of it and it certainly didn’t make it to mainstream. There are several examples that always seem to grab the technologist in me. NeXT computers, for example were a marvel, but in retrospect, I am glad we didn’t fill up the office with them.

Technology roadmaps are helpful, but not granular enough to provide that crystal ball into the future. That is not to say they are not helpful; a well-crafted roadmap can convey tremendous information in a single slide. That is the level that is useful: Including potential dates for new technology launches, basic parameters that will be achieved by the new tech, and necessary interfaces to work with them are important; if there are broad objectives we can expect the most useful roadmaps.

When embarking on developing or utilizing a technology roadmap, company leadership should address these four essential questions:

• Where are we today?
• Where could we go?
• Where should we go?
• Where are we currently headed?

Here are the basic steps in creating a technology roadmap:

• Identify your strategic objectives
• Determine the roadmap's audience(s)
• Establish your roadmap's major themes
• Share your roadmap with relevant stakeholders
• Refine your roadmap based on stakeholder input
• Meet with your team to assign responsibilities and start making progress

The other key thing to remember is that the roadmaps of other organizations or sectors will likely impact the roadmap you are developing. These should be reflected to ensure the various pieces play together well.

Knowing the right level of trust to put in technology prognostication is a truly valuable skill in today’s ever-changing technological landscape. When the landscape changes as fast as the electronics industry does, you better be sure your technology roadmap is flexible and up-to-date, or you will not end up where you intended.

This column originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine.