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About Alexander Osterwalder
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Blog postThis blog was idle for a year. I was busy building Strategyzer.com. Now I'm back to content production, working on our next book with the working title Value Proposition Design #vpcbook. It will be about making remarkable stuff that sells with business models that work. The book should be released next fall. Sign up for the launch notification in the sidebar.
We started the book in August 2012. A long time ago. Unfortunately, the project always feel victim to other priorities. Now we'r -
Blog postAfter several years "on the market" there are now multiple Business Model Canvas adaptations floating around. People sometimes ask me about them. This blogpost provides an answer by explaining the Canvas through the analogy of a Theater (watch the video). It shows why we got it right and why most adaptations are broken.
When Yves Pigneur and I set out to find a better way to describe business models we had the following objective in mind: What are all the most important deci -
Blog postDoes this sound like you? You strive to help companies unlock potential by using better business design techniques. You have already done so by researching, applying and "teaching" practical and visual business design tools, in particular the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas.
The opportunity
Work with me and the team behind Business Model Generation (500,000+ copies in 26 languages), the Business Model Toolbox for iPad, Strategyzer.com, and the -
Blog postHave you ever been in one of those endless meetings, where smart people sit around a table, talk a lot, but don't get to a real outcome? My friend and author Dan Roam calls that "Blah Blah Blah". Over the last couple of years I saw first hand how visual methods like the Business Model Canvas can end blah blah blah and enable clear and tangible strategic conversations. This post shares a wonderful story that illustrates that.
My biggest learning from working with senior execu -
Blog postIn my last post I described a new business tool, the Value Proposition Designer Canvas. In this post I outline how you can use the tool to not only design Value Propositions, but also to test them. You’ll learn how you can supercharge the already powerful Lean Startup and Customer Development principles to design, test, and build stuff that customers really want.
The Value Proposition Designer Canvas (VP Designer Canvas) allows you to zoom into the details of your Value Proposition an -
Blog postI’m a big fan of the Lean Startup movement and love the underlying principle of testing, learning, and pivoting by experimenting with the most basic product prototypes imaginable - so-called Minimal Viable Products (MVP) – during the search for product-market fit. It helps companies avoid building stuff that customers don’t want. Yet, there is no underlying conceptual tool that accompanies this process. There is no practical tool that helps business people map, think through, discuss, test, a
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Blog postMy aspiration is pretty simple: I want to change the way people design, test, and build strategies and businesses. Part of that journey is about bringing the best conceptual tools out there online and making them so useful, practical and attractive that no business person can resist. To achieve that my team and I are looking for an outstanding tech co-founder and a senior RoR developer. Do you want to join us?
Our track record: When we created the Business Model Canvas we created a st -
Blog postThere are a lot of reasons why business models fail. Understanding them can help us better manage risks. In this post I sketch out the four main types of failure.
I've been thinking about failure a lot recently. As an early-stage software entrepreneur failure is starring at me big and ugly every morning. Yet, rather than just denying the possibility I prefer understanding and managing the risk of failure. And when I say "failure" I mean the big and hairy type that can put yo -
Blog postEvery couple of weeks somebody sends me an email writing that I'm missing a building block in the Business Model Canvas. Often, they point out that competition is missing. They're wrong. "Competition" is not a business model building block, it's part of the environment in which you design your business model.
Though I believe we're too obsessed with competition, it would obviously be naive not to take into account existing or potential competitors when you design your busine -
Blog postAt every talk and workshop I try out something new to see if it sticks with the audience. An image that resonated a lot was describing the Business Model Canvas as a theater with a front stage and a backstage.
What creates value in a theater is the action that takes place on the front stage. It's what people came for and what they are paying for. The backstage, however, is what makes the front stage possible, it enables the front stage. The Business Model Canvas is similar. The right- -
Blog postThis guestpost tells the special story of how Sebastián Salinas Claro and Joshua Bicknel connected across the globe on the Business Model Hub. They joined efforts in their aim to defeat poverty by teaching entrepreneurship. The results are amazing.
By Sebastián Salinas Claro (with Douglas Cochrane and Joshua Bicknell): My recent journey illustrates the power of social networks and how linkedin and the Business Model Hub brought me to Kenya - all the way from Chile. It wa -
Blog postThe Business Model Canvas is continuing to spread across the business world. However, some people and organizations use it in more sophisticated ways than others. So I came up with four levels of strategic mastery as to competing on business models.
At the lowest level of mastery, level 0 strategies, people focus on products, technologies, and value propositions mainly. They aren't even aware that it is often the business model that makes the difference between success and failure. At -
Blog postLast week I had the honor to speak at the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at Stanford. During my stay I also had the opportunity to work and chat intensively with Steve Blank to advance with the alignment/integration of our methods.
I very much enjoyed my stay in the Bay Area and had a lot of fun sharing the stage and class room with Steve Blank five times at Stanford, Berkeley, and the exciting California College of the Arts CCA. Watch my Stanford talk:
I'd a -
Blog postI've been thinking about "plug-ins" that complement the Business Model Canvas for a while. One concept that I've been looking at more closely over the last few weeks is the invaluable "jobs-to-be-done" approach. I tried to turn it into a visual approach like the Business Model Canvas (BMC). The result is a prototype conceptual tool, the Customer Value Canvas Map v.0.8. now called Value Proposition Canvas.
Update: the final outcome of the Value Proposition Canvas ca -
Blog postVisual Thinking is central to designing, testing, and building business models. So I was really excited when Dan Roam accepted to write a guest post on the Business Model Alchemist. His brand new book “Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work.” is THE reference book to have better conversations and effective meetings.
At the heart of a business.
At the heart of every business beat two essential elements: an idea and a plan. An idea without a plan is just a dream. A pla -
Blog postUltimately, customers are the only relevant judges of your business model. However, even before you test your model in the market, you can assess its design with 7 questions that go well beyond the conventional focus on products and market segments.
First things first. In order to assess your business model you should sketch it out on the Business Model Canvas outlined in the video below. If you want to know more about the Canvas and how to use it you can read Business Model Generatio -
Blog postI wrote about Computer Aided Design Tools (CAD) for business people years back in my doctoral dissertation. With the Business Model Toolbox for iPad we now made the first concrete steps towards a whole new breed of computer aided business design tools. The Toolbox combines the speed of a napkin sketch with the smarts of a spreadsheet. It enables you to map, test, and iterate your business ideas — fast.
It always struck me that we have relatively few good software tools in business to -
Blog postThe Business Model Generation is about people who strive to defy outmoded business models. They are visionaries, game changers, and challengers who want to design tomorrow’s enterprises. To succeed on this journey they will require new tools, such as the Business Model Canvas and Steve Blank's Customer Development. In this post I outline how they fit together.
This post comes mainly as a reaction to the various attempts by others to adapt and merge the Business Model Canvas with Custo -
Blog postOriginally I was planning to write a post on "Why The Crazy Facebook ($50B) and Twitter ($3B) Valuations Might Just Make Sense" by highlighting the key characteristics of their business model (e.g. scalability). However, I thought it would be way more fun to reverse engineer Facebook's business model with ballpark figures in collaboration with you, my smart and loyal blog readers.
I sketched out the kernel of their business model and researched/guesstimated some numbers, sin -
Blog postIf architects conceived and constructed buildings the way we do start-ups there wouldn't be much standing. I'm deeply convinced we can change that and substantially increase the odds.
Admittedly, launching a start-up means dealing with more unknowns than in architecture. The former deals with unpredictable markets and potential customers, while the latter deals with solid materials and the laws of physics. However, while an architect uses concrete tools and systematic methods to come-
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