Innovation isn’t unintended. Behind each new invention and product, together with the machine you’re utilizing to learn this story, is years of analysis, funding, and planning. Organizations that need to attain these milestones within the quickest and best approach doable use expertise roadmaps.
Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and professor of engineering methods, faucets into his experience in methods design and engineering to assist firm leaders develop their very own path to progress. His work has led to an MIT graduate course, two MIT Skilled Schooling lessons, and the textbook “Technology Roadmapping and Development: A Quantitative Approach to the Management of Technology.” Not too long ago, his textbook was honored with the Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook and Educational Authors Affiliation. The textbook not solely serves as a information to college students but in addition to firm leaders. Aerospace design and producer Airbus, protection expertise laboratory Draper, and bundle supply large UPS have carried out de Weck’s strategies. Right here, De Weck describes the worth of expertise roadmapping.
Q: What’s expertise roadmapping, and why is it vital?
A: A expertise roadmap is a planning instrument. It connects present merchandise, providers, and missions to future endeavors, and identifies the particular applied sciences wanted to realize them.
Let’s say a company desires to construct a spacecraft to discover an asteroid within the farthest reaches of our photo voltaic system. It’s going to want a brand new form of electrical thruster expertise in order that it might journey to the asteroid sooner and extra effectively than what’s at present doable. A expertise roadmap particulars a number of elements, akin to the extent of efficiency wanted to fulfill the objective and tips on how to measure progress. The information additionally hyperlinks numerous tasks inside a company, together with technique, product improvement, analysis and improvement (R&D), and finance, so everybody understands the applied sciences which might be being funded and the way they may profit the corporate.
Expertise roadmapping has been in use for over 5 many years. For a very long time, it was taught in enterprise faculties in a extra common and qualitative approach, however the observe has advanced over time. The expertise roadmapping I train and write about makes use of quantitative engineering evaluation and connects it to strategic considering. From 2017 to 2018, I used and refined this method for Airbus, which has a $1 billion R&D price range. Collectively, we developed over 40 expertise roadmaps, which included a plan to construct ZEROe, a industrial plane that may run on hydrogen gasoline, by 2035.
Q: Are expertise roadmaps used broadly in {industry} immediately, and what gaps in data/processes does your method tackle?
A: Colleagues from the College of Cambridge and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and I lately performed an industry-wide survey about expertise roadmapping. Of the 200 corporations that participated, 62 p.c stated they use expertise roadmaps to make strategic funding selections and 32 p.c replace them yearly. But solely 11 p.c of corporations plan applied sciences 10 years out. This can be a bit regarding as a result of expertise doesn’t transfer as quick as many individuals consider. Utilizing Airbus’s ZEROe plane for instance, you will need to assume 10 and even 20 years forward, not simply inside three to 5 years.
My method to expertise roadmapping makes use of a technique I name Superior Expertise Roadmap Structure (ATRA). It supplies a step-by-step methodology to create a expertise roadmap that’s extra rigorous and has an extended time horizon than conventional roadmaps. ATRA asks 4 important questions: The place are we immediately, the place might we go, the place ought to we go, and the place we’re going? As a substitute of applied sciences, I would like folks to consider these questions as a information to their retirement investing. You would spend money on some high-risk mutual funds, low-risk bonds, or an index fund that may comply with the market. You’d choose investments that mirror your future targets and danger tolerances. ATRA works in the identical approach. It allows organizations to pick the right combination of R&D based mostly on totally different eventualities and totally different danger tolerances.
Q: Are you able to share the way you designed your ebook and the programs, together with 16.887/EM.427, to assist college students perceive and apply expertise roadmapping?
A: My time at Airbus allowed me to implement and battle-test expertise roadmapping and ATRA. Once I returned to MIT in 2019, I had already drafted chapters of the ebook and MIT college students offered nice suggestions, which allowed me to refine and enhance the ebook to the purpose the place it might be helpful and comprehensible to future MIT engineering and enterprise college students, {industry} practitioners, and C-level executives.
An vital characteristic of each my textbook and sophistication that is probably not apparent is my deal with historical past. With innovation shifting as quick as it’s, it’s simple to say a never-been-done-before expertise. That’s typically not the case — for instance, one pupil did a expertise roadmap of digital actuality headsets. He realized that folks have been doing digital actuality within the Nineteen Sixties and 70s. It was tremendous crude, clunky, and the decision was poor. Nonetheless, there’s a 60-year historical past that must be understood and acknowledged. My college students and I’ve created a library of almost 100 roadmaps on wide-ranging applied sciences, together with superconducting nuclear fusion, lab-grown meat, and bioplastics. Every one traces an innovation’s historical past.
