An emerging technology heat map can be a valuable tool to illuminate the various emerging and disruptive technologies on your organization’s radar. When sourced internally across your organization’s various divisions and departments, it can serve as a rapid assessment tool to help reveal and set priorities as well as areas for further collaboration and coordination.
The heat map can help uncover synergies across divisions and departments where you might be able to leverage investments, projects, resources and/or tools. It’s also important to explore the differences. These may reveal where one group has discovered an opportunity that might work for others or perhaps a niche area or use case only applicable to a single division or department. Either way, the heat map will quicky reveal these similarities and differences and help to further these important discussions. The target audience for these discussions can be division leads themselves, in order to play back the cross-divisional findings, as well as the C-suite to share and capture feedback on these firm-wide priorities.
Follow these steps to design, implement, and act on your emerging technology heat map.
Start by creating a template that includes the technologies you wish to evaluate and what you’d like to learn about each of them from your internal stakeholders. A simple heat map might look at the potential business impact of a set of 15-20 emerging and disruptive technologies in terms of low, moderate, high, or transformational impact upon the business.
This template should be further specified so respondents know the exact timeframe for making their assessment, such as today’s perceived impact or the perceived impact upon the 2025 strategy looking across the entire time horizon.
For each technology or trend listed, it’s also important to provide definitions so that respondents know exactly what is meant by certain terms, such as “digital twins” or “3D printing”, but also the intended scope of more common terms such as “cloud computing” or “mobility”. In terms of mobility, for example, the scope when considering potential business impact might include devices, applications, and infrastructure as a whole.
