Companies pursue innovation to succeed but often miss the mark because their efforts aren’t rooted in customer understanding and don’t deliver value. Customer experience (CX) pros can help, using a variant of a reliable tool they know well: journey mapping. That variant is called future-state journey mapping, and it helps companies create new offerings, unlock new areas of value, and envision possible futures ranging across multiple horizons — from the near term to the long term. In this report, we explain how to do it.

(The report replaces a previously published one. It has been significantly rewritten based on new research and includes changes to the framework to explicitly accommodate long-term innovation horizons, the impact of emerging technologies, and roadmap planning. Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.)