Seeing the Science and Technology Pipeline

For management purposes, visualizations are not merely for reporting, they can be strategically deployed to support decision-making. If properly designed, and designed well, visualizations can be used to trigger and structure the necessary conversations between stakeholders, so enabling much-needed discussions and even healthy debates. As a practical demonstration of designing and developing a purposeful visualization, an illustrative industrial example is provided which depicts a portfolio of science and technology projects within a product pipeline. This new visualization has a novel format and logic-driven layout that exemplifies a richness of relevant information for managers and executives. The visualization brings together and shows total budget and contributions from strategic business units; current fiscal year spending; key performance indicators for each project and an overall assessment of the domain; decision gates; degrees of difficulty to advance along the steps in technology readiness; confidence of delivery; and initial market applications.