Innovate to Win!

Peter Drucker defined the functions of a business as marketing and innovation. "Everything else is a cost", Management, 1974. The network described in Cooperate to Win (above) takes care of the marketing function. A cooperative network of people across the functional boundaries in the business, and across the cultural boundaries between the business and its customers can execute the marketing function infinitely more effectively than departments in a compartmentalized hierarchy can.

The same network can execute the innovation function.

Is it Innovation or a Wacky Idea? The Customers Decide

In business, innovation is innovation only if the customers trade their money for your "innovative" outcome. Because innovation requires intimate knowledge of the customers, the same cross-functional teams delivering the marketing function can deliver the innovation function far more effectively than any functionally compartmentalized hierarchy can.

Cross-functional teams spanning the internal departmental boundaries AND the boundaries between the business and its customers will know before investing in a potential innovation whether the customers, peers in the same network, will want it or not.

The brightest person working all day every day in the development lab simply has no way of knowing that. Innovations happen mainly by accident in compartmentalized hierarchies. That's why businesses invent things like Ford's Edsel. It's why the Dot Com boom busted. It's why Post-It Notes and the Hula Hoop were big winners, although both developments failed miserably in their intended applications.

Business Development Programs

Our Business Development Programs create new business elements - such as new products, new product lines, new applications, new services, even new businesses. Our programs develop networks linking a broad range of people in our clients' businesses with a broad range of people in their customers' businesses.

Typical Business Development programs have run from a few months to a few years in duration, depending on the magnitude and complexity of the mission.

Sales Channel Development Programs

Our Sales Channel Programs develop seven networks of people liking the business AND its sales channels directly with its customers. These seven networks overcome the dysfunctional nature of the typical overly simplified, conventional sales channel models in common use. The simple models put the sales channels between the Business and its Customers. The network model links all the people in the business with the target customers. Our clients have used this network model to win customers from the best competitors.

DeltaNet's Role

We have developed the fundamental building blocks for our Programs. They include all of the Workshops and Services on this site. Because no two Programs are the same, we apply the fundamental building blocks as needed, when needed, to reach the Program Goals. We call it Just-In-Time training.