Disruptive technology roadmaps

Disruptive technologies create growth in the industries they penetrate or create entirely new industries through the introduction of products and services that are dramatically cheaper, better, and more convenient. These disruptive technologies often disrupt workforce participation by allowing technologically unsophisticated individuals to enter and become competitive in the industrial workforce. Disruptive technologies offer a revolutionary change in the conduct of processes or operations. Disruptive technologies can evolve from the confluence of seemingly diverse technologies or can be a result of an entirely new technological investigation. Existing planning processes are notoriously poor in identifying the mix of sometimes highly disparate technologies required to address the multiple performance objectives of a particular niche in the market. For a number of reasons, especially the inability to look beyond short-term profitability, and the risk/return tradeoff of longer term projects, it is suggested that current strategic planning and management processes promote sustaining technologies at the expense of disruptive technologies. We propose a systematic approach to identify disruptive technologies that is realistic and operable and takes advantage of the text mining literature. This literature-based discovery process is especially useful in identifying potential disruptive technologies that may require the input from many diverse technological and management areas. We believe that this process holds great potential for identifying projects with a higher probability of downstream success. Further, we suggest a process to take the identified potential disruptive technology from the idea stage through to the development of a potentially feasible product for the market. This second stage makes use of workshops and roadmapping to codify the ideas of technological and management experts, who were identified in the literature-based discovery stage. Our goal is to describe and explain the pragmatic steps suggested by our innovative and practical process. The proposed process could identify technologies whose eventual development and application to specific problems would generate innovative products. The goal is to isolate technologies that have the potential to redefine an industry, or alternatively, have the potential to create an entirely new industrial setting. Use the text-mining component of literature-based discovery to identify both the technical disciplines that are likely candidates for disruptive technological products, and experts in these critical technical and managerial disciplines. While we know that this is but one way to investigate nascent disruptive technologies we feel it is imperative that the representatives of these potentially critical technical disciplines are included in the roadmap development process, either as implementers or as consultants. Every firm is looking for the next great thing. Literature-based discovery offers a starting point for identifying at least a portion of the major contributory technical and managerial disciplines necessary for potential disruptive technologies and discontinuous innovations. Combining literature-based discovery with a practical workshop/roadmap process dramatically enhances the likelihood of success. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.