Roadmapping for Sustainable Innovation – Charting the Route towards Sustainable Development

In the 30 years since roadmapping first became a topic of broader interest in academia, business, and administration, it has rapidly evolved to a valuable managerial method to apply R&D and connect high value solutions with future markets, or more broadly: to identify new opportunities and addressing risk and uncertainty for innovation planning and technology development (Moehrle et al., 2013). In contrast to the variety of concepts proposed in literature and many applications in companies and different industries, however, roadmapping is rather used as a standalone technique, yet, primarily for charting the route to success in business terms, economic indicators, and technology performance (Moehrle & Isenmann, 2008). There are different ways to realign roadmapping to sustainable innovations. The goal of this contribution is to investigate and describe the various approaches how roadmapping could be brought together with the goal of sustainable development, finally to advance the use of roadmapping to sustainable innovation planning and to support managerial decision-making in a proper manner. According to that goal, the contribution sheds light on promising movements delivering current approaches and good practice examples describing the ways to systematically link roadmapping and sustainable innovation planning.