Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series)

Your business model defines how you compete. It is the manifestation of your corporate strategy and the basis for your profitability. Given its importance, its surprising business models are not better understood. Business Model Generation seeks to address this point providing a comprehensive and engaging approach to understanding and creating business models.This is perhaps the most innovative book on business design to come around in a long time. The book is the work of Alexander Osterwalder and more than 470 collaborators and contributors. It provides a graphically engaging, spirited look at business models, their creation and application in business.This is the first book built by mass collaboration based on the participation and contribution of multiple people giving the book a level of practicality that is welcome in subject that can easily become academic. The book is organized into six sections that correspond to the processes involved in generating a business model. The sections include:Canvas - which discusses the basics of the business model template and its nine building blocksPatterns - applies the model to understand different business models and companies that exemplify the business models.Design - the techniques used to develop the nine building blocks within the business model which include: customer insights, ideation, visual thinking, prototyping, storytelling and scenarios.Process - concentrating on applying these techniques to creating a business modelOutlook - a view on the future of business models.The book is highly recommended for people who want to learn more about business models, its related techniques and wants to put them into practice. The book's approach, its layout and treatment of the subject are refreshing and helpful.StrengthsThe book offers a comprehensive view of business models. The five sections talk you through the activities involved in creating a business model including multiple techniques.Osterwalder's model for business models is clear and provides an effective structure for understanding your business and how it fits with your value proposition, strategy and products.Placing the models in action to explain companies like Apple, the newspaper industry, and the insurance industry among others. Applying the model builds you understanding of model's context andCovers advanced techniques including ideation, visual thinking, story telling that help you expand your toolkit.The illustrations and use of photography creates an engaging read that draws the reader into material and keep them engaged.ChallengesThere is litle that is fundamentally new in this book, other than its presentation, construction and style. That is not to say that the book is bad or wrong, its just that ideas related to value propositions, capabilities, etc appear elsewhere. What this book does do and do well is bring these ideas together in a novel and accessible way.The majority of the book is based on the Osterwalder's own model developed while he was at Lausanne. The dependence of the book on the model can limit its effectiveness if you take a different approach to business modeling.The book provides limited support for key functions such as IT, HR and Finance which are not explicitly supported in the business model which focuses more on issues of strategy and positioning.The book is large and bound by its narrow edge. While this makes the books photography and graphics possible, but it also makes the book unwieldy.The book is not available in electronic format as that does not work with the book's layout.

If you are going to read one business book on design, innovation and business models this is the one. I plan to give a copy to each of my adult kids.Business Model Generation brings together a simple but compelling framework for organizing business models with a wide range of frameworks and techniques from stragegy and design thinking. It includes important ideas around multi-sided platforms (two-sided markets for you economists), applications of design thinking, scenario plannning ... It is a powerful integration of these ideas, one that most people will be able to act on. The book also has an excellent website at [...] and the collaborative approach to authoring and validating the book is fascinating - some 470 people from around the world contributed to the book.I read this in parallel with Cory Doctorow's new novel MakersMakers and the two books riff off each other in interesting ways (the fictional company Kodacell could be seen as a scaling of the business model generation method). It is worth thinking about what happens in Makers while imaginging new business models.I do have some questions about the book, and a few reservations.Why no index? In a book like this an index is necessary, and the designers could have used this as an opportunity to innovate a visual index, perhaps using mind mapping.The design. I have long been advocating this kind of visual design for business books. Reading this one I had some reservations. The book is influenced by PowerPoint and web design and has some of the weaknesses, see The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition. I had to work hard to integrate the information and ideas in the book into a story. I am glad that the authors and designers took the approach they did, but this approach to books needs a lot more work before we really understand how to use it.Depth and originality. There is little that is new here. What is powerful is the way in which so many current ideas are integrated. I am not an expert in all of these areas, but where I do have some deep knowledge, pricing for example, I found the content thin and in some ways misleading. For example, there is no discussion of value-based pricing and the role it plays in driving differentiation. See Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, The (5th Edition) (Alternative eText Formats). I also thought that the treatment of design thinking smacked too much of received wisdom and did not question or innovate on the paradigm (I know, that is not the purpose of the book).The book is a bit weak on execution, and I am hoping that the website will be a place to track how people are using the business model generation approach and what experiences they have with business model execution.But I expect to come back to this book and to use it in my own companies and in coaching others. So, despite my reservations, six stars!