About
Strategic Technology Roadmapping for Digital Services
A global technology company with over 70,000 employees and activities in over 60 countries serving aerospace, rail, digital security and defence. Conducted a review of the front-end innovation processes and conducted several strategic roadmapping workshops at market sector levels. Identified several high-potential areas of improvement.
“I found the workshop process engaging and Rob provided knowledgeable facilitation. It was well structured and covered a lot of ground in a single day.”
Head of Service Engineering.
“I think you can reasonably claim that £100mpa of new products and services was identified: I consider that to be a good return on investment. And we were also able to develop a rigorous process to develop business cases bound for our new digital innovation centre.”
CTO
Assignment
The Chief Technology Officer for the UK wanted to understand the issues and opportunities for improving the front end of innovation and innovation portfolio management. Selecting with the CTO two business units, Rob designed a process to audit capability, create new value on real imperatives – Digital technologies and services – and transfer best-in-class innovation management methods into the business to sustain improvements. I developed and led the project under my association with IfM Engage.
Process
Strategic technology roadmapping and portfolio methods are an essential toolset for innovators operating at the so-called fuzzy front end of innovation. But without a business imperative, the impact can be artificial. A new topic area was chosen to identify new sources of value creation – Digital Services – for one of the businesses and identify the new capabilities required. Rob facilitated several one-day strategic roadmapping workshops with the senior technology and strategy community which, by identifying high-potential digital products and service lines created an immediate business impact and provided the company with a method for repeating in future on other topics. In parallel, an audit was run to identify issues and opportunities to improve front end methods and highlight training and development needs.
Business Impact
- Over £100m in realised new business value was generated.
- A clear understanding is the real barriers to front-end innovation was identified.
- A process for strategic roadmapping emerging technology was transferred to the business.
Want to know more?
Read Here about the process to quickly but rigorously produce a strategic roadmap for your organisation. If you are interested in Technology Planning read Here about the approach.
Rob Munro is an innovation strategist and consultant focussing on improving innovation results within organisations. Please contact me to discuss ways to bring greater effectiveness to your innovation and technology management processes.