Customizing roadmaps: Lessons from the cutting room floor

“Roadmap” strategic foresight tools have been implemented to coordinate the diverse actors across sectors, including in maritime economies and blue growth policy. The application of these tools is consistent with new directions in literature on innovation that is starting to question our past analytical emphasis on the role of individual organizations in transformative sustainability initiatives. In this emerging paradigm, there is renewed interest in understanding how diverse actors in interdependent networks pursue, coordinate, incentivize, and collaborate on ambitious innovation agendas, especially those associated with sustainable transitions. This article examines the implementation of roadmap foresight tools, in this case, policy innovation roadmap (Spaniol et al., 2020), by ECOPRODIGI, an initiative of the Interreg VB Baltic Sea Programme, for the transition to eco-efficient shipping. As roadmapping techniques are increasingly used to inform maritime policy and innovation, it becomes incumbent upon the actors in those policy spaces to be knowledgeable about how roadmaps are constructed (see, e.g., McDowell, 2012).