Technology Roadmapping Background
In January 2015, President Obama announced the award of the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI), a $259 million public-private partnership focused on lowering the cost and energy required to produce carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composites while increasing the material’s recyclability. IACMI held its Inaugural Members Meeting to officially launch the Institute in June 2015.
The Institute is initially focused on three applications where advanced composites manufacturing can have significant national benefits: vehicles, compressed gas storage, and wind. To ensure IACMI conduct research aimed at solving industry’s needs in these areas, IACMI leadership will solicit industry input as it further develops the IACMI Technology Roadmap in the months ahead. The IACMI Roadmap must also build upon other relevant roadmapping activities, maintaining focus on achieving the 5- and 10-year technical and economic objectives of the Institute, and provide a sound technical basis for future IACMI projects.
Given IACMI’s budgeting cycles, IACMI required preliminary roadmap results in an accelerated timeframe, to be followed by more thorough stakeholder consultation and roadmap development in 2016 and ongoing roadmap monitoring and updating thereafter. Accordingly, the roadmap development approach has been described in three Phases:
- Phase 1: Accelerated roadmap priority identification (2015)
- Phase 2: Full roadmap process development, stakeholder engagement, and roadmap development (2016)
- Phase 3: Roadmap monitoring and updating (2017 and beyond)This document is the Phase 1 IACMI Technology Roadmap.
About the Roadmapping Process
- IACMI partnered with Nexight Group, a technical and management consultancy specializing in technology roadmapping, in August 2015 to assist IACMI in building this Phase 1 Roadmap. To build this preliminary roadmap, Nexight Group conducted the following activities:
- Literature Review-Conduct an accelerated literature review, with emphasis on recently published roadmaps and literature sources of relevance to IACMI’s scope and focus. See Section A for a summary of the literature findings
- Expert Interviews-Conduct one-on-one telephone interviews with experts both within and outside the IACMI domain. Section B provides a general summary from the Phase I interviews.
- Online Survey-Prepare and conduct an online survey of IACMI members to solicit views on the relative priority of potential technical activities. In total, more than 800 IACMI partners and interested parties were invited to complete the survey; more than 100 individuals completed the survey. See Section C for summary of survey results. Conducting an online survey like this needs strategic planning, to learn more about how to get one like this set-up for future reference, it is best to look online at websites such as qualtrics.com for assistance.
- In-Person Roadmapping Meetings-Nexight Group facilitated two in-person working meetings in Knoxville at which the IACMI technical leadership team defined priorities and timelines for IACMI technical activities. The output of this exercise is captured in Figures 1 to 6.
READ the full overview in the PDF below.