The Innovation System Roadmap: A novel approach to instil futures-oriented reasoning in strategic decision making

Society is in constant flux and increasing in complexity, challenging organizations to approach innovation in a more proactive manner. This entails anticipating, rather than reacting to what could be next by preparing for a variety of possible futures. Specifically, it means exploring the future value of an idea rather than analysing it as is. In the context of the fuzzy front end of a new product development, scholars highlight the efficacy of using anticipatory systems and the underlying futures-oriented reasoning to make more accurate decision making (i.e., futures thinking, abductive reasoning and contingency mapping). Yet how to systematically stimulate such reasoning in practice is still understudied. The paper presents findings from semistructured interviews with expert innovation managers, which show that futures thinking approaches do feature in strategic decision making on innovation ideas. Yet they are limited in their use and in most cases outweighed by more classical, deductive reasoning patterns. The paper proposes the Innovation System Roadmap (ISR) for innovation managers making strategic decisions on early-stage ideas. It leads users to employ the cognitive processes underlying anticipatory systems. The Innovation System Roadmap stimulates innovation managers to hypothesize the future value of a given innovation idea and how it may (not) be turned into a commercial success following further development. We contend that the Innovation System Roadmap supports innovation managers for sound decision making in early-stage innovation under extreme uncertainties.