Strategic roadmapping to accelerate and risk-mitigate enabling innovations: A generalizable method and a case illustration for marine renewable energy

Abstract

Understanding technological evolution and its implications is increasingly important as the public and private sectors harness next generation technologies to address society's major challenges. Current roadmapping methods for these enabling innovations suffer from several limitations and often shed more light on technology viability than adoptability, leading many to frame related pursuits as unpredictable high-risk, high-reward activities. However, recent research highlights that the risk associated with developing enabling innovations depends more on the approach to pursuit than the technology itself. Drawing on this perspective, we put forward a strategic roadmapping approach that overcomes historical limitations by: 1.) framing technological advance as a complex socio-technical transition and 2.) drawing upon related patterns of high-impact innovation to inform unique roadmapping analyses. The result – the Enabling Innovation Strategic Roadmapping method – examines technical, economic, and socio-cultural barriers to progress to define windows of opportunity in which viable technological capabilities can be matched to adoption-ready needs within and beyond the motivating sector, fostering advance toward a long-term vision, technology convergence, valley of death avoidance, and means to influence ecosystem evolution. To illustrate the methodology, we develop a strategic roadmap for marine hydrokinetic energy technologies that could support the advent of a marine renewable energy economy.