Innovation Roadmapping: Building Concepts from Practitioners’ Insights

Cartographic roadmaps used for navigating from A to B provide a strong metaphor for innovation roadmaps used at firms for navigating from the present to the future. Now ready to move beyond this metaphor—the pace and proliferation of knowledge on innovation roadmapping have reached a point at which it would be useful to lay out some groundwork for extended theorizing and research in this area. This paper contributes here by reporting on a qualitative inductive research based on documented practitioners’ insights. To better understand the phenomenon of innovation roadmapping (what it is and what it is not) and its impact on innovation performance, this study builds concepts in the context of strategic innovation management theory. Through a systematic analysis of the qualitative data extracted from 12 cases selected from the extant literature, this research found five concepts with common ground in these cases and built a framework in which innovation roadmapping is established by (1) a strategy of time pacing, (2) synchronizing dialogues, and (3) mapping innovation elements to a timeline. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of the documented practitioners’ insights indicates that roadmapping affects either the innovation performance of (4) competitive timing or (5) industry synergy. Overall, this leads to an initial formulation of theory with this conceptual framework and six related propositions. The key insights for innovation managers in industrial firms are that, in striving for competitive timing or industry synergy, roadmapping provides a means to achieve these objectives and, in deploying roadmapping in the organization, dialogue and pacing are critically important.

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