1 Computer Assisted A ordable Technological

Technological roadmapping (TR) emerged in the 70's as an interactive strategic planning process. Due to its relatively high costs, duration, mobilisation of human resources and know-how, its hitherto applications were attributed mainly to long-term strategy formation in large corporations and as a tool supporting policy making. This paper will show how to use modern information system technologies to provide a ordable roadmapping for high technology SMEs. In particular, we will report on an implementation of roadmapping methods in .NET that may serve as a base for systematic thinking about the future when solving IT investment planning problems. We will also describe the application of on-line TR to the new product development and market placement problem (NPD-MP). Such problems are solved frequently in innovative companies that compete for the best market share with new products. A web-based analytic machine that supports roadmapping is able to generate optimal technological investment strategies, visualised as conditional multicriteria shortest paths in classical roadmapping diagrams. We will show that computer assisted roadmapping is a complex collaborative process that forces the use of new internet tools for managing, sharing and acquisition of knowledge. In this context, we use the integrated capacity o ered by ontologies and semantic networks. TR makes also possible to extract formal and informal knowledge from heterogeneous information sources such as expert knowledge, web, records from past technology foresight projects.