OVERVIEW: Driving innovation—particularly disruptive innovation—demands that companies possess a deep understanding
of the nonobvious problems that will need to be solved in the future. Gaining this understanding requires that companies scan
their external environment, identify trends, and then envision future problem states from the perspective of end users or customers.
Such an outside-in view is difficult for successful incumbent firms that already possess a dominant logic about their
markets and competitive drivers. Strategic roadmapping provides the means to help companies develop this outside-in view
and challenge their current competitive perspectives. Here we present a 10-step methodology for strategic roadmapping and
show how one group at Intel was able to use this process to envision the future of its business in new ways.
Dr. Pop is a popular education website that helps people become better story-tellers and strategic thinkers. We do this by telling stories ourselves, explaining complicated things in simple ways, and showing how and why we did it. Along the way we focus on how the economy, urban planning, and democracy work, provide living examples of how they can work better, and offer tools for organizers, educators, students, activists and all manner of curious people who are interested in change.
I believe that the general consensus among those who study this kind of thing, is that any decision made wholly by a computer is an operational decision, even if it affects the behavior/tasks of many people or sub-components. Online decisions, being a subset of automated decisions, would then be operational in nature.