Technology Landscape Mapping At the Heart of Open Innovation

Open innovation efforts traditionally focus on sourcing external solutions against known needs. This approach, while helping the organization to close gaps in internal capabilities, has only limited impact on ideation and strategy. A broader awareness of technology and market trends can itself become a powerful source of new and differentiating ideas. Because of this, a systematic process for building technology awareness and articulating and disseminating knowledge within the organization is critical for enabling a collaborative cross-functional ideation process. This can be accomplished through systematic, proactive scouting and technology landscape maps, which, for a given technology domain, identify technology drivers, critical technology attributes, related existing and emerging technologies with their commercial readiness levels, and the opportunity space enabled by these technologies. We are sharing a new framework, with associated processes and tools that we developed at Kennametal. This process addresses a broader set of objectives than targeted technology searches and is versatile enough to be applied to any technology domain.