Need for Structured R&D Roadmaps – Daimler Example

Source Daimler
It takes a long time to develop new technologies and integrate them into products. The wired article How Daimler Built the World’s First Self-Driving Semi has a great example:

Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades.

As amazing as this thing is—it’s a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works—company execs say it won’t can’t change lanes on its own, it won’t be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.

Clearly, developing technologies takes a long time. So successful development needs intermediate productization of technologies.

Much of the technology in the Inspiration—the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture—has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.

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Disruptive Innovations are Expensive

Companies around the globe pursue breakthrough technologies to grow. Surveys show that executives remain dissatisfied with the return on innovation investment.

The article Source: The big costs behind Google’s moonshot start-ups provides some useful data.

The debate among tech analysts isn’t about whether the moonshots will lose money, but rather how large the losses will be. Estimates cited in a recent Wall Street Journal article range from as little as $500 million in operating losses to $4 billion a year — and separately, one analyst, representing the “high estimate on the Street,” has placed a $9 billion price tag on Google’s far-flung efforts.

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