Traditional strategy work happens in a closed room. A small group of executives goes off-site, comes back with a plan, and cascades it through the organisation. In deep-tech and mission-driven innovation that rarely works, because the people who understand the technology best — and who will have to make the strategy real — weren’t in the room.
The third component of the Mission-Driven Innovation System treats strategy as something built with the organisation, made visible through technology roadmaps, and kept alive as the organisation learns.
Key points
- In complex technology work, strategy has to draw on the people closest to the technology.
- Roadmaps connect the mission, markets, technologies and capabilities on one timeline.
- The hardest risks should be tested first, not last.
- Technology readiness is not the same as market readiness.
From command to co-creation
Research on strategy execution has shown for years that communicating a strategy is not the same as creating understanding of it. The gap between leadership intent and what teams actually do widens with every layer a plan passes through. A mission-driven strategy process closes that gap: leadership frames the mission and sets the guardrails, and the substance of the strategy is developed together with the engineers, researchers and partners who will carry it out. When the people implementing a strategy are also its architects, ownership stops being a communication problem.
Technology roadmapping
Technology roadmapping gives co-created strategy its structure. Developed extensively at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, a roadmap lays out markets, products, technologies and capabilities against a shared timeline, so everyone can see how a change in one layer affects the others. In the Mission-Driven Innovation System it is less a document than a facilitated process — and the conversations it creates are often worth as much as the finished chart.
Frontloading risk
Conventional technology management tends to postpone the hardest questions until late in development, exactly when changes are most expensive. Mission-driven strategy reverses this and deliberately brings the most decisive uncertainties forward, while experiments are cheap and choices can still be undone.
Timing the leap
A working prototype doesn’t mean a market is ready. As Howard Yu argues in LEAP (2018), lasting advantage comes from moving at the right moment. Leaders need to follow two curves — technology readiness and market readiness — and prepare patiently for the point where they meet.
In the book
- The mission-driven roadmapping process, step by step
- Five types of technology risk and how to frontload them — with the Deep Sky case
- How to set strategy at portfolio level and avoid the “demand specification trap”
- The LEAP mindset applied to cases such as Ørsted and Tesla
Where this fits in the system
Strategy connects purpose to action. It is carried out through governance structures that give teams autonomy within clear guardrails, and funded through mission-driven budgeting.
Further reading
- Phaal, R., Farrukh, C. J. P. & Probert, D. R. (2004). Technology roadmapping — A planning framework for evolution and revolution. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
- Yu, H. (2018). LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied. PublicAffairs.