In recent decades, companies, industries, and even governments have been motivated by technological advances to improve alignment between their strategic objectives and technology management and innovation by applying flexible and structured methods. Technology roadmapping has been a well-accepted response to this need by organizations. Technology roadmapping is an important tool widely used within industries for collaborative technology planning. It is considered a flexible technique to support strategic and long-range planning and coordination for corporations or entire industries. The technology roadmapping (TRM) approach provides companies or industry sectors with a well-structured and often visual pathway for investigating the relationship between emerging and developing markets, products, and technologies. This technique can also benefit a turbulent business environment and protect companies from potential losses. Moreover, the flexibility and benefits of this technique have led to a rapidly increasing literature for TRM, and companies and industries have been adopting this technique increasingly.
Despite the deceptively simple format of technology roadmaps, there are significant challenges in their implementation and development as mainly the scope is generally broad and contains complex concepts and involves human interactions. Moreover, there is little practical support available for TRM, and the companies applying TRM typically need to re-invent the process and adapt it to their business situation. In addition, TRM does not cover the area of innovation when a required technology does not exist and needs to be developed. Therefore, they need to be equipped with technology development solutions and means to assess their risks.
This research proposes an innovation-based risk-adaptive TRM process for those companies that need to develop products and services for which the required technology is not yet existing. It presents an integration of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) and TRM throughout the roadmapping process as well as the Analytic Network Process (ANP) for final decision making between alternative technologies. The proposed method also uses a Bayesian Network Model to investigate risk propagation in the roadmap.