Cross-functional Working: Some Thoughts about the Third Market Orientation Component Implementation

During the last 15 years, businesses, technologies, business models have become much more complex. Business environment will continue to grow, becoming more complex and volatile, providing new opportunities for companies that have the ability to quickly identify and exploit such opportunities. The competitive dynamic has led to greater instability in profitability. In this complex global context, the consumers' power has increased unprecedentedly, leading us into a consumer economy. Today, the consumer has become more sophisticated and better informed, being driven by the principle of "value for money". Client-led economy, knowledge and lifelong learning have become key success factors. Thus, the knowledge component of products and services has increased significantly in importance and has become the dominant component of the value offered to the customer. Based on these changes in the business environment, companies are more concerned with finding ways to build customer value by working cross functionally. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the importance of inter-functional cooperation in developing new products, to provide an inventory of the antecedents and consequences of cross-functional cooperation and to proposes a series of principles for the operationalization of this concept into the companies' practices.