Taxonomy of technology roadmaps in service areas

Abstract

Recently, the importance of services in the economy has been rapidly increasing, and dominating trends of industries has been moving toward services. Many corporations recognized that the adoption of services into their manufacturing processes can create new opportunities and started to improve their business models by combining product offerings with service offerings. Under the circumstance of this servitization, a tool for strategic planning in the service area is in urgent need. To meet the need, this research focuses on the possibilities of using technology roadmap as a tool for service planning. Roadmap is a popular planning tool for products and technologies, which helps align R&D plans with business needs. Though the existing roadmaps have emphasized their use in product or R&D planning, it can also be a powerful tool for service planning. For manufacturing firms, roadmap can help combine their product plannings with service plannings, since it is useful for integrated planning. On the other hand, for service firms, it can incorporate technology planning into their service planning, where the importance of technology has increasingly emphasized. For the purpose, this research purposes to develop taxonomy of technology roadmaps in the service areas, taking a bottom-up approach by collecting the existing roadmaps in the service areas and analyzing their characteristics in terms of roadmapping purposes and roadmap formats. The bottom-up approach is adopted in this research because roadmaps have been developed as a management practice not a management theory and thus investigating roadmaps in use will give meaningful implications for exploring the possibilities of using roadmaps for service planning. The research results are expected to provide meaningful information about roadmaps for those who are in charge of strategic planning in the service industry.