یک رویکرد توابع برای بهبود نقشه های فناوری بخش  A functions approach to improve sectoral technology roadmaps

1. Introduction Future-oriented Technology Analysis is a projection, to the future, of current knowledge and has as main role to assist societies, decision makers and businesses to tackle difficult decisions when it comes to technology and its impact on economic development (Daim and Oliver, 2008; Cagnin et al., 2013). Due to the potential of FTAs in enabling a better understanding of complex problems and in defining more effective policy responses, interest in studying its theoretical and practical implications has grown, see for example the Special Issue in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, edited by C. H. Cagnin, A. Havas and O. Saritas in 2013. Among the many FTA tools, the roadmapping approach has become widely popular during the last decade and has been adopted by companies, governments and other organizations, due to its capability to link technology/innovations, policy and business/social drivers (Garcia and Bray, 1997; Lee and Park, 2005; Daim and Oliver, 2008; Saritas and Aylen, 2010; Carvalho et al., 2013; Moehrle et al., 2013). As it can be verified in the previous literature, there are two main traditions of roadmapping: corporate roadmaps, which relate to the development of temporal and graphical means to explore and communicate the relationship between markets, technologies and products (Phaal et al., 2004a, 2004b; Lee and Park, 2005); and roadmaps at sectoral and national levels, which relate to the development of visual narratives describing multi-layered strategy maps of both, the macro-level currents and the micro-level developments (Blackwell et al., 2008; Phaal and Muller, 2009), in order to identify trends (Lee and Park, 2005) and forward-looking policy design (Ahlqvist et al., 2012). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in introducing a systems perspective within the roadmap approach, especially at sectoral level (see for example, Ahlqvist et al. (2012) and Saritas and Oner (2004)). Following this line of practice, the paper introduces the concept of ‘innovation systems’ and more specifically, the ‘functions of innovation systems’ into the roadmapping process (Alkemade et al., 2006; Hekkert et al., 2007; Bergek et al., 2008). In this sense, each system function serves as one dimension of analysis for the roadmap (i.e. the drivers). In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this proposal, we provide the case study of a sectoral roadmap exercise aiming at establishing a novel automotive sector in Southern Brazil (a sector which does not exist at present time in the region).