Planning and Roadmapping Technological Innovations

This chapter compares R&D strategies from four companies and different sectors, specifically communication. The companies use communication to manage their R&D activities. Interviews were conducted with R&D managers, focusing on the communication element of R&D management while using a consistent framework obtained from literature. The case study will show that effective R&D management and strategy play a critical role in giving a company a competitive advantage.

Chapter 2 discusses the selection of projects with limited resources. Project selection is critical for an organization to be successful in the achievement of their corporate strategies and competitive advantages. Due to dynamic changes in the business environment, advancement in technology, and condensed product life cycles, companies need to focus their efforts on identifying, selecting, and maximizing their R&D projects to meet customer demands and develop a successful product. Failure to select the best R&D project can cause valuable resources to be spent on poor projects, which yield little result. The aim of this chapter is to identify the criteria that company uses to evaluate and rank R&D projects based on priorities and to select the most appropriate R&D project among several competing projects.

Trial and error are inevitable in the process of software development; unfocused communication wastes valuable resources during redesign. To speed up this development process, an optimization of the information flow and a redesign of the development organization were initiated, specifically by creating “chunks” or groupings of tasks and people. First, we investigated the information flow between tasks and utilized the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) to couple tasks into phases, thereby reducing information exchange among chunks of tasks and eliminating the redundant iterations of tasks. Meanwhile, we also grouped the engineers into groups in order to eliminate wasteful communications between the groups of engineers. We depicted the social network defined by the information flow within the software development sector and compared the new arrangement to the old arrangement in a visible way. This new arrangement will facilitate the communications between engineers and speed up the process of software development.

Chapter 4 is conducted to holistically evaluate the critical elements of R&D management—R&D planning, R&D organization, R&D portfolio management, R&D project management, and R&D knowledge transfer—by assessing R&D management from different sectors. The research methodology is based on an intensive literature review by delving into the literature to have a full understanding of the critical elements of R&D management. In addition, R&D managers from the three firms were interviewed in order to gain insight on how R&D management functions within the critical elements of R&D management.

This study creates technology roadmaps for medical imaging. Four roadmaps were created for future products to include advanced imaging, high-tech imaging, super-tech imaging, and ultra-tech imaging. A literature review of academic and medical sources was conducted to collect data and review TRM (technology roadmapping) methodologies.

An analysis was performed for each level of the roadmaps to include market drivers, product features, technology capabilities, and resources. The aforementioned levels were linked and timelines provided to construct the roadmaps. The probable future products were advanced computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission and ultrasound devices. To generate the technology roadmap layers, this chapter explores different tools like SWOT, QFD, scenario analysis, and gap analysis.

The objective of this study is to explore the current trends and the future adoption of products, technologies, and resources in the EHR industry (electronic health records) by means of a detailed technological roadmap. Demographics, governmental healthcare reforms, and mobile health are considered as the primary market drivers and the various T-plan analysis tools such as Porter’s five forces model, SWOT analysis, quality function deployment (QFD), and S-curve analysis were employed for the purposes of this study. The result of this paper is a technology roadmap for the “complete EHR” system by the end of the next 4-year timeline. The paper is based on data collected from sources that have been subject matter experts in the relative fields for many years. This report intends to illustrate the roadmapping process by bringing the cognitive thinking onto a swim lane chart to direct the critical path for an organization.

Flexible displays are thin, lightweight, unbreakable, and energy saving, which can be fabricated using the existing display manufacturing facilities, reducing the significant cost of building new facilities. In addition to displays, the flexible solution can be beneficial for a multitude of applications: automotive, medical, technical, and educational applications. The objective of this chapter is to develop a technology roadmap for flexible display technology. The research focuses on the application of flexible display in automotive industry. We will introduce market drivers, product, and technology analysis and also provide research on the necessary resources needed within R&D in the coming years. This chapter also presents tools like QFD – quality function deployment – matrix to perform the mapping between appropriate products and technologies. An extensive literature is conducted to gather information for the different layers of technology roadmap.

Technology roadmap (TRM) is a powerful management tool for technology planning process. The uniqueness of this tool enables firms to identify and develop technology alternatives that are required to meet a set of product or service needs. In this framework, we utilized this powerful tool to measure the pace of the next hybrid PC generations. The main catalyst behind this study is attempting to answer the question of why PC sales have shrunk recently. We started conducting our research by applying the macroeconomics forces at the macroscale to have a clear vision of the exerted forces on PC industry—namely, the impact of tablets, ultrabooks, laptops, and smartphones on PCs. Accordingly, we conducted an intensive literature review followed by a survey to understand the trends of PC industry as well as the end users’ needs. Based on the knowledge extracted from the literature and the survey, we constructed the technology roadmap of the next hybrid PC generations. The developed roadmap—consisted of drivers, products, technology, and resources—empowered us to evaluate the current state of PC industry and revealed technological gaps implicitly. We believe the technological gaps discovered by this framework will help any hypothetical manufacturer pioneer in the PC industry to cope up with the dynamic of PC market for the next 5 years. Market research is conducted using Porter’s five force model, and the data for other layers of technology roadmap are from literature research and surveys.

In order for the USA, as well as other nations, to decrease their dependency and reliance on imported fossil fuel, to control and reduce the largest source of their carbon emission, and to secure their national transportation system, a faster transition from the internal combustion engine to the electric vehicle has to be promoted. The public and private sectors will have to work hand in hand to ensure reaching such a national goal.

This chapter lays out a technology road map for a private company “Tesla Motors,” proposing a balanced mixed basket of technology push and market pull strategy in order to get closer and closer to the desired goal. Fossil fuel does not have to run out in order for the transition to take place. After all, the reason why humanity came out of the Stone Age was not due to the lack of stones; there’s still plenty out there. Tools like STEEP analysis, gap analysis, and QFD are used to come up with the technology road map.

In 2011, Portland State University (PSU) transitioned its email and office applications suite to Google Apps. Google Apps for Education is a suite of Internet-cloud-based services provided by Google, which include email, calendar, document sharing, and access to these applications from Windows and Macintosh computers, as well as mobile devices (Google FAQ [Available Online] http://​oit.​pdx.​edu/​google-faq#4. Accessed 10 July 2012). PSU, like most higher education institutions, is now using cloud computing services for applications and data. As colleges and universities increase their business and academic use of cloud services, cybersecurity technologies and governance practices need to evolve. The current research proposes a technology road map for creating a more secure and stable computing environment for a higher education institution such as PSU.