Over the last 25 years, I’ve spent thousands of hours and run hundreds of innovation sessions designed to help business executives across all industries to develop better strategies which will enable them to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to developing the most innovative products and services to serve their customers.
One of the most important tools in my arsenal as an innovation consultant is the Innovation Roadmap Template, a tool that provides a visual representation of steps to be taken to achieve a long-term strategic goal driven by innovation.
What is an Innovation Roadmap, and what are best practices, tools and online templates for teams and organizations?
An Innovation Roadmap is a visual depiction of the steps to be taken to achieve a strategic goal driven by innovation. As a strategic tool, an Innovation Roadmap lays out the specific actions that should be implemented over time to create new products, services, or business models. An Innovation Roadmap allows your team to plan how and when to communicate each step of the innovation process to other relevant stakeholders in the organization. The tool is valuable because its simple graphic nature clearly outlines the goals of the innovation process, is easily conveyed to others, and orients those involved in the innovation process to create alignment and accelerate execution.
Creating an Innovation Roadmap consists of several steps which can be broken down as follows:
- Determine innovation goals
- Identify barriers and enablers
- Identify success criteria
- Gain leadership alignment
- Build the visual roadmap
- Communicate and share the roadmap
- Align Roadmap to Business Strategy
- Track Implementation Progress
- Refine and Iterate
The Innovation Roadmap tool is most often used to support innovation, product development and planning. Here’s a freely available template download based on best practices from Praxie.com.
About the Author:
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a columnist for Inc. Magazine, a globally recognized keynote speaker, and the Founder of Praxie. Business Insider and the Thinkers50 have named him one of the world’s top management thought leaders and consultants.
