Robert Phaal’s research while affiliated with University of Cambridge and other places

Roadmapping is a well-established technique in the context of innovation and strategy, with the potential to support organizations address the complex transformative challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. This is enabled by its systems-based architecture and visual form of roadmaps, supporting communication and reduction of information asymmetries in complex sociotechnical systems. This paper focuses on an adaptation of the roadmapping method to support strategic planning for roadmapping systems in organizations, addressing implementation challenges. This represents a novel application of roadmapping to business processes and systems, demonstrating the flexibility of the roadmapping approach. A workshop template (‘R2’) and process for supporting the roadmapping of roadmapping systems is presented, developed and refined through a series of six industrial cases, and illustrated with an application example in the additive manufacturing sector.

Roadmapping is a powerful and scalable systems-based approach for supporting strategic alignment within and between organizations. Although established practice in industry, roadmapping is seldom considered in mainstream management research, teaching, and textbooks. To address this gap, this article provides a brief overview of roadmapping practice and concept, highlighting three functions that should be more widely appreciated: Roadmapping for 1) Communication and consensus; 2) Diagnostics and learning; and as 3) Prime systems integrator.

Continuing rapid advances in digital technologies offer considerable scope to enhance roadmapping processes. Research and development have focused on information gathering and roadmap management. However, digitalization also involves the interaction between roadmapping participants and digital tools as part of remote and co-located digital workshops. This chapter explores remote and co-located digital roadmapping applications, gathering and discussing insights and opportunities that could support digital roadmapping progress. A novel framework, merging processual and psychosocial perspectives, is proposed to support research analysis and the description of findings. Results suggest that the digitalization of roadmapping can support improvements in information processing and narrative building during interactive workshop environments, leading to more robust roadmaps. However, brainstorming and consensus-building can be hindered by remote roadmapping. The differences between co-located and remote roadmapping seem to be the core factor impacting roadmapping performance rather than adopting digital tools. With careful planning and design, the digitalization of roadmapping shows great promise in achieving the benefits of digital technologies without losing the advantages of human-centric processes.

Roadmapping is a flexible and powerful method for supporting strategic planning, which emerged from industrial practice more than 50 years ago. However, roadmapping has been largely ignored in mainstream business school research and teaching, attributed to its association with technology-intensive sectors. As a consequence, many general managers are not aware of the capability of roadmapping to address the strategic challenges they face, and the method lacks a clear theoretical base. Through empirical research, the general form of roadmapping has been identified, together with underpinning conceptualizations that enable its customization to any strategic context. This chapter sets out these general concepts from the perspectives of ‘roadmap as artefact’ and ‘roadmapping as process’, and relates them to mainstream management research. Two relevant research streams relating to ‘strategic fit’ are identified: ‘elements of strategic fit’ and ‘processes of strategic fit’. The relationships between roadmapping and the contributing management frameworks from each research stream are explored, focusing on the McKinsey ‘7S’ and ESCO frameworks for the former, and the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) framework for the latter. This strengthens the theoretical basis of roadmapping and demonstrates the benefits of linking established roadmapping practice to management theory. Three key dimensions that underpin coherent strategy are identified and discussed: horizontal functional alignment, vertical hierarchical integration, and temporal synchronization, conceptualized as a 3×3×3 ‘strategy cube’.

This chapter describes a value-oriented roadmapping (VRM) framework, which helps entrepreneurs improve the investor readiness of their ventures through developing better business models. As investors tend to perceive risks where entrepreneurs only have eyes for the opportunities, this value-oriented roadmapping framework is a practical tool to help bridge the gap between investors and entrepreneurs, reducing information asymmetries. The value-oriented roadmapping framework is a practical tool for entrepreneurs, developed through a series of eight case studies. The tool is a template-based (‘canvas’) approach, incorporating design elements that encapsulate process guidance for users. In a workshop setting, led by an experienced facilitator, participants critically assess the venture’s market, capability, application, revenue model, capital investment and IP-position, from an investor’s point of view. This qualitative appraisal is translated into a quantitative assessment, incorporating finance and options valuation theory and methodology. The end result is a roadmap for value creation, where in the end both investors and entrepreneurs require a reward for financial risks taken.

Roadmapping as a method for integrated strategic planning of products, technologies, processes, services, or business models is in the focus of the Roadmapping Field Study. Since the contents and areas of application of roadmaps vary greatly in practice, we set ourselves the goal for the Roadmapping Field Study of finding out how roadmapping is used in the real world. The study was first conducted in 2015. The current study is an online survey with 190 participants. We asked for the organizational areas of application and the content, the organizational integration, the use of information sources, methods, and tools as well as for the challenges and best practices. In addition to the results, differences to the 2015 study as well as correlations are discussed. The results include, for example, that roadmaps are predominantly used for products in strategic planning and rather rarely for production planning.

Im Mittelpunkt der Praxisstudie Roadmapping steht die Methode des Roadmapping als Methode der integrierten strategischen Planung von Produkten, Technologien, Prozessen, Dienstleistungen oder Geschäftsmodellen. Da die Inhalte und Einsatzbereiche von Roadmaps in der Praxis stark variieren, haben wir uns für die Praxisstudie Roadmapping das Ziel gesetzt, herauszufinden, wie Roadmapping in der Praxis tatsächlich zum Einsatz kommt. Erstmalig wurde die Studie 2015 durchgeführt. Bei der aktuellen Studie handelt es sich um eine Onlineumfrage mit 190 Teilnehmern. Wir haben nach Einsatzbereichen und Inhalten, organisatorischer Einbindung, nach Nutzung von Informationsquellen, Methoden und Tools sowie nach Herausforderungen und Best Practices gefragt. Neben den Ergebnissen werden die Unterschiede zur Studie 2015 sowie Korrelationen diskutiert. Zu den Ergebnissen gehört beispielsweise, dass Roadmaps vorwiegend zur Planung von Produkten in der strategischen Planung zum Einsatz kommen und eher selten für die Produktionsplanung.

Strategic planning in response to disasters is distinctly different from strategic planning in normal situations. The experience of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has shown that a vaccine rollout program as a disaster response requires a different approach from current routine vaccination and disaster response frameworks. A holistic conceptual framework for planning vaccine rollout disaster response programs is proposed, building on the experience of COVID-19. The customizable framework was developed to have high dynamicity, flexibility, and applicability, incorporating key decision-making factors and suitable time frames (phases and transitions), based on roadmapping principles and techniques. In this research, we focus on the COVID-19 pandemic vaccine rollout program in the United Kingdom (UK) as a representative case of disaster response planning due to the availability of public data and access to the relevant stakeholders. We applied Platts’ process approach as a methodology and used various sources of information including an extensive literature review, expert interviews, and retrospective roadmapping (mapping past experience). As a result, we propose a strategic roadmapping framework for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout program to support visual planning of time-based strategies with the integration of various resources and demand environments. Apart from this practical contribution, we demonstrate that the concept of roadmapping can be applied beyond technology and innovation management domains to a novel research domain such as disaster response.

This article investigates roadmapping features using a value proposition approach. First, three main roadmapping customers are defined to underpin the study: facilitators; owners; and participants. Then, a model of roadmapping features—organized as jobs, pains, and gains—is proposed and evaluated. The analysis of the proposed model indicates that the planning and deployment stages are critical to delivering better value to roadmapping customers. The most relevant jobs, pains, and gains for each customer are also discussed, helping companies and roadmapping professionals to design roadmapping processes for improved value delivery.