Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings are authors of Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth now available in e book and soft cover versions. In this article for The NextWomen they provide an insight into their theory of collaboration as a driver of growth.
Demand Creation will be the driving force for businesses to achieve sustained, profitable growth for the next decade. Simply, demand creation is the improvement of collaboration—based on new business processes supported by technology—enabling organizations to be more customer-centric and responsive.

So why is this so important for the woman entrepreneur and innovator? Since women are intuitively more collaborative and customer responsive, Demand Creation leverages natural management skill sets the next women leaders can leverage to successfully grow their businesses.

Four profoundly significant business revolutions are coming together in a perfect storm of innovation: the digital revolution, a business process revolution, a business organization revolution and the Internet revolution. Successful companies will learn to reshape their R&D, marketing, sales and IT functions and job specifications within a new customer-centric organization paradigm to take account of these changes.

A new customer-centric organization: From Inside Out to Outside In

The fundamental change is a reversal of the flow of the corporation from inside-out to outside-in. All the activities of the corporation that were outbound—R&D, sales, marketing, advertising, promotion, service centers—must now be reversed. The customer decides when they have a need and when they are ready to listen to information or receive a service from a company that might be able to meet that need. The company must restructure so it can anticipate and respond.
Inbound-outbound relationships must change, as must centralized/decentralized relationships. The center is no longer the locus of power in the organization, no longer where all-important decisions are made. The hierarchy no longer functions because Demand Creation decisions must be made at the bottom, rather than at the top. We need to engineer business processes and structures, metrics and technology to enable the decentralization of decisions by everyone in the organization to serve the consumer/customer.

The organization has to rethink strategy, structure, process and rewards. Management must now reconsider the kinds of people, processes, and rewards to get things right in opening the organization.

And women entrepreneurs and executives can be at the forefront of this new Demand Creation.