A Strategic Guide to R&D Technology Investment

Companies typically use product needs — such as features, attributes and specifications — as a starting point to diagnose capability gaps and technology needs. Market-pull roadmaps help  to prioritize technology project goals by depicting the technology competencies required to support product roadmaps or launch plans.

Given their product orientation, market-pull roadmaps require R&D to work closely with marketing and business stakeholders during the scoping and analysis phases. Roadmapping teams can also conduct their own trend, technology, market and industry analyses to understand how future customer needs may impact the business within the roadmap time horizon.

Market-pull roadmaps tend to have shorter time horizons — three to five years, on average — and are most often scoped to support a specific business or product category.

Technology-push roadmaps depict potential product and market growth opportunities driven by differentiated technologies. These roadmaps challenge organizations to think beyond their near-term product strategy and tend to be longer-term, often spanning the next five to 10 years.

Technology-push analysis can happen in two ways:

• Differentiating internal capabilities. This approach involves prioritizing the most valuable, differentiated, existing internal technologies to chart a future-technology-led development pathway.

• Integrating emerging technology opportunities. This approach involves tracking new (often external) technologies and brainstorming how they can improve existing offerings or deliver new products or features.

Many companies use both types of analyses within the same roadmap. In both approaches, prioritize technology competencies based on their ability to create competitive advantage and future differentiation.

Because technology-push roadmaps are often disconnected from core product strategy, getting buy-in from business stakeholders for riskier investments can be a challenge. Recommended investments in technology-push roadmaps tend to have a lower commercialization rate than investments in market-pull roadmaps.

Hybrid roadmaps combine the market-pull and technology-push models, depicting both the technology competencies required for product launches and a prioritized set of technologies with the potential to create long-term competitive advantage. This model allows R&D leaders to create a roadmap that encourages long-term planning and enterprisewide capability development, while still grounding those plans in tangible business needs and goals.

Some hybrid roadmaps lean closer to market-pull, others lean closer to technology-push, and some are a 50-50 split. In practice, most companies start with the near-term market-pull analysis of the technologies needed to support product strategy. They then engage in technology-push activities to identify additional growth opportunities.

Given the volume of analysis that could be included in hybrid roadmaps, some organizations struggle to build elegant one-page visuals. To solve this, a hybrid roadmap might take the form of a multipage story that walks stakeholders through the various components or levels of analysis and related recommendations.