Alexander Osterwalder

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started.

Ranked No. 4 of the Thinkers50 list of the most influential management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies.

Strategyzer, Osterwalder’s company, provides online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation.

His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, Testing Business Ideas and The Invincible Company.

Alexander Osterwalder has a PhD in Management Information from the University of Lausanne. After graduating, he founded netfinance.ch, which supplied education in online trading and investments. He was a journalist for BILANZ and senior research fellow at the University of Lausanne from 2000 to 2005 until he founded BusinessModelDesign.com in 2006 and in 2010 the consultancy firm Strategyzer.

In the late 2000s, Osterwalder and a team of 470 co-creators published a very attractive and popular model for describing business models: the Business Model Canvas. The Business Model Canvas offers you an excellent model to further develop your ideas about the business model for monetising data. This book was followed last year by Value Proposition Design – a deep dive into one of the crucial elements of designing a business model.

The best companies manage to innovate while being successful According to Alexander Osterwalder, one of the main challenges for many companies is to innovate while they are successful. He argues that the reason is that it is two entirely different ecosystems and that they should be kept separated. But only to a certain extent because the only advantage innovative teams have in large established organisations as opposed to the superior speed of the start-ups is if they can draw on existing resources (i.e. people, brand, finances and know-how). It is extremely hard for any successful organisation to question the way they do business today, but to thrive in a world of disruption, it is necessary to self-disrupt once in a while – like Apple and Amazon, claims Alexander Osterwalder. To do that successfully, we need to build agile organisations where resources seamlessly can be moved from less profitable areas to opportunities of growth.

At Implement, we share this view. During the last two or three decades, we have experienced an increase in the frequency and magnitude of major changes unparalleled in history. We see disruptions and disruptive innovation as natural consequences of that development and as an emphasis of the importance of changing the way we work with strategy, innovation and change. Today, more than 2/3 of change initiatives do not live up to their stated objectives.