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Technology selection or investment decisions are HIGH RISK decisions for managers because they reach far into the future where solid information is scarce. With tight budgets and relentless worldwide competition, organizations need every competitive advantage they can find. Technology mapping yields amazingly accurate long-range forecasts of technology developments. As a result, you can make more accurate, more confident decisions.
Making accurate strategic decisions will be even more important in the future. The 2008 IBM Global CEO Survey reports that "organizations are bombarded by change and are struggling to keep up." The survey suggests that organizations need to become
- "innovative beyond customer imagination"
- "disruptive by nature", and
- comfortable with outside collaboration.
To be innovative, disruptive and comfortable with outside collaboration and especially if risk also needs to be controlled, new organizational processes will be needed. We believe that a key competency for the future will be the ability to use technology mapping to efficiently identify strategic trends, challenges, threats and opportunities.
We define technology mapping as a business or opportunity analysis process which typically supports strategic technology decisions including R&D program selection or investment decisions, business development decisions, competitor analysis, and acquisition or licensing decisions. Technology maps include patent maps, maps of science and trade literature, regulatory literature maps, product introduction maps and the like. The result of the mapping process is a comprehensive analysis that leads to more accurate and more confident decisions.
While technology mapping is often seen as new process, the key ideas are not new. The foundation for interpreting technology maps has been laid by Christensen, Chesbrough, Davenport, Ashton & Klavans and others. In addition, see our chapter on Technology Mapping (published by SCIP).
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