technology‑review.com

Method 10 · Assess

Technology Portfolio Analysis

Portfolio analysis transfers the thinking of strategic planning to technologies: every field is rated on two axes — technology attractiveness (development potential, breadth of application, time to market) and one's own resource strength (know-how, patents, financial and personnel base). From the position in the grid follow normative strategies: invest, proceed selectively, divest. The value lies less in the precision of the placement than in the compulsion to look at the whole field at once and set priorities — technology strategy is always also the decision about what one does not do.

INVESTSELECTIVEDIVEST RESOURCE STRENGTH → ATTRACTIVENESS → Circle = fieldsize = commitment
Attractiveness against resource strength, three normative zones — and the fields as circles whose size shows the commitment. The compulsion to take the overall view is the actual benefit.

Procedure

  1. Delimit technology fields. Comparable granularity — not "AI" next to "sodium-ion cathode material".
  2. Rate attractiveness. Fix criteria (potential, breadth, time, risk), weight them, rate per field — as a team, not alone.
  3. Rate resource strength. Relative to the strongest competitor: where do we really stand?
  4. Place and derive the normative strategy. High/high invest, low/low divest, in between selective — justify every deviation from the norm.
  5. Use as a basis for discussion. The grid is the beginning of the discussion, not its result.

Strengths

  • Forces the overall view and prioritisation.
  • Connects readily to strategic planning and budgeting.
  • Makes implicit preferences explicit and debatable.

Limits

  • The ratings are subjective; the grid lends them false objectivity.
  • Two axes suppress interactions between fields.
  • Normative strategies are rules of thumb, not decisions.

How we use it in our roadmaps

The portfolio logic sits in the implications for action of every roadmap (block 5): per time horizon the recommendation watch / pilot / invest / ignore — that is the normative strategy, broken down to one bundle and one point in time. Because we do not know the individual reader's resource strength, we formulate the implications for the reference industries of the ADL matrix and make the assumptions visible, so that the reader can transfer them to their own house.

Across all ten roadmaps a portfolio picture emerges for the club: which bundles are pressing for decision, which tolerate observation. The monthly update summarises exactly these shifts.

References