Book Sips #45 — ‘Business Model Generation’ by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
This is the ‘Designing The Value Proposition’ old brother, the zoom out where all ideas should rely on in order to progress sustainably (business-wise). Same format and appearance but you can recognize a less disruptive content format yet. Quality is undoubtedly there though… I can’t believe more than 10 years have passed since this was written, it aged so well!
Generating a business model, as Alexander Osterwalder proves, is not just optimizing resources to maximize benefits. The canvas, like a brain, has two different parts: customer-centric and resource-centric unified by the famous value proposition.
Creating value for both the business AND the customer and finding the model pattern that better suits your business (unbundling, long tail, multi-sided platforms, free or open business models as common patterns) is key to success. A sip:
‘[…] business model prototypes vary in terms of scale and level of refinement. We believe it is important to think through a number of basic business model possibilities before developing a business case for a specific model. This spirit of inquiry is called design attitude, because it is so central to the design professions, as Professor Boland discovered. The attributes of design attitude include a willingness to explore crude ideas, rapidly discard them, then take the time to examine multiple possibilities before choosing to refine a few (and accepting uncertainty until a design direction matures).’
Make it desirable but also feasible and of course, viable!
#joshdixit
Business Model Generation
by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
Why read?
An essential read for everyone willing to dig deeper into the business model world. This book is much more than a simple explanation of the famous template you might have seen, it’s a whole narrative on how to make products that people like and use, with the resources available and keep iterating on it!
288 pages, Wiley, 2010
Get this book here on Amazon!
