Applying Innovation to Delta’s Product Development
April 05, 2018, Keith Teichmann
These days, the majority of companies like to call themselves innovative—almost to the point where the word loses its meaning. But what does it take to be truly innovative? Whether you view innovation as a new idea, device or method, or as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, the premise is the same: it solves a problem. As Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” To add value and improve the quality of life for societies around the world, we need organizations and businesses to embrace and prioritize innovative practices. That being said, at Delta we consider innovation to be paramount to our daily activities and a primary driver for addressing our customers’ needs, mitigating their pain points and anticipating their unforeseen delights.
Two fundamental principles that shape our approach to innovation are to think big, start small and move fast and to anticipate step changes. Let’s look at each principle directly:
- Think Big, Start Small, and Move Fast: Driven by customer intimacy, market intelligence and vision, we differentiate between “wants” and “needs” and identify customer “pain points” through extensive voice of customer (VOC) research. Through this process, we are able to anticipate market shifts and customer delights. Then, leveraging our expertise, we connect the dots between customers, products, technologies, advanced processing, channels and processes.
- Anticipate Step changes: When we anticipate step changes we ask ourselves two questions: What concepts, principles, and technologies will fundamentally change our product experience and manufacturing capabilities? What concepts, principles, and technologies will replace the fundamental need for our products and shift our industry? Based on the answers, we can align with our VOC research and develop innovative solutions to customer concerns.
Applying these fundamental principles and recognizing the unique opportunity afforded by uniting power distribution with a pioneering, customer-centric network, we developed a singular, standardized, and scalable solution—called the Delta Smart Grid Network (DSGN™)—that tackles all four elements of a power network: distribution and communication, smart metering, optimization, and installation and servicing.
The innovation behind today’s smart phones paved the way for strategically grouping multiple purposeful products into one exceptionally capable device. Delta’s Smart Grid Network taps the same strategy to innovatively join smart grid infrastructure, Wi-Fi mesh networking and consumer-facing digital devices into a singular, standardized and centralized smart city solution.
The Delta Smart Grid Network™ unites the primary elements of power infrastructure management, Wi-Fi mesh networking, cloud-centered analytics, augmented reality interfaces and consumer-centric digital device capability to build the world’s first, Wi-Fi based, second generation advanced metering infrastructure (AMI 2.0). All while using Delta’s patent-pending hardware, software, networking and cloud-centered technologies.