Guidance for environmental technology development of the future

Environmental technology is a key sector in the German State of Baden-Württemberg. To support all stakeholders in this sector, an integrated technology roadmap was created for the lead markets "water", "circular economy" and "air" in a collaborative approach between the State Agency Umwelttechnik BW (UTBW) and two research organisations. The objective of such an integrated technology roadmap was to provide a secure base for the agency to plan their future strategic action fields and also to give guidance to relevant stakeholders in the state, especially small and mediumsized companies, R&D institutions, and policy-makers. The roadmap was developed using secondary information from existing research studies and primary information from three workshops involving 20 experts and from conducting 17 expert interviews. The 31 derived market and technology trends have a time horizon of up to 15 years and were documented in trend factsheets. In a systems analysis, a cross-impact analysis was conducted to determine relationships between trends and lead markets. The resulting roadmap was visualised by a professional graphic designer and results were presented on a conference day for practitioners. UTBW will use the determined trends to inform relevant stakeholders and will continue the monitoring of trends. This paper describes the methodology used and the challenges encountered in the course of developing the roadmap.